Also media.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the very podcast about wait shit, bad people podcast, the worst in all of history. I'm the host of the show and also bad at introducing it. Let's distract everyone from me being yet again incompetent at the one thing I have to do other than redescript, and bring on our guest, Ed zitron ed, How you doing today?
What's up? I'm great, You're great.
That's good. That's better than bad. Ed your podcast called better Offline, don't you?
I do?
And you talk about a number of things on that show, But you've kind of you've gained a great deal of fame and notoriety lately by repeatedly calling out a lot of the grifty and Connie aspects of what some people call the AI Revolution. I think that would be that would be fair to say. And you you're working on a book right now, aren't you. You want to give us the audience the title of that book.
It's called Why Everything Stopped Working, and it's about how everything stopped working due to technology and how we got to where we are today, which kind of fucking sucks.
That is a great premise, and I can't wait for the book, and I wanted to help you out with some research ed on something that's kind of off the beaten path and not directly involved with the tech industry that you've reported on, but in terms of like how people fall for cons and specifically con technology products, it's a really important story and so I think you might get some value in hearing it, even though it's technically set in an industry that's not your immediate industry. This
is a defense industry technology story. Hey have you ever heard the story about the bomb detectors that didn't work that everyone, particularly I RAQ bought. Okay, great ed, We're going to have a really good time today.
Oh boy, speaking of things that explode, remember when bezos Is rocket exploded yesterday.
It sure just did it sure just didn't. And anytime something explodes, I'm happy, unless it's like a bad explosion that.
Nobody nobody, nobody died, nobody dies. And so the videos were really fun. Yeah that was a big boom.
Yeah it is. It is amazing how just knowing like no one was hurt can make the two different equally nightmarish explosions one of them just be really funny. Like you watch the video that explosion when that the town of West in Texas blew up a few years back, and it's not fun at all. It's just terrifying. But the Blue Origin rocket blowing up pretty funny.
We looked at every angle.
It made the sound that Rats Terrell did in Phantom Menace when he crashed, right. It's the same explosion, the same sound. But I was much sadder about Rats Terrell.
I love that you know his name, man, of course. Yeah, so as you know, ed, and it's everyone who listens to your show knows. The US tech industry is currently dealing with a teen C issue of its entire economic foundation, increasingly resting on a bed of fraudulent claims about what AI can do. And every week you break down some new lie or set of lies about how this new AI update or whatever works, or which giant fantasy data
centers are actually being constructed in which aren't. And for those of us who care about objective reality and what companies to sell products that actually do something, this is a distressing state of affairs. And I wanted to give you a story about kind of how dumb that process can get, and how really easy it is to trick even very serious people into buying absolute nonsense as long as they feel like though they're dummies who are missing
out if they don't buy it. That's the story. And ultimately it's going to take us to a rack and a fake bomb detecting device that got so many people killed, a startling number of people killed. Yea, but first, first dead. We got to start in prehistory and in the far reaches of time with a psychological phenomenon that we now call the idio motor effect. You've heard of this, right? Have you heard of the ideo motor effect?
No?
Okay, this is may you may just not remember the name, because this is like a like this is basically when your thoughts or you're like mental images of something cause
a reflexive and generally unconscious automatic muscle movement. Right, So you and your friends are around a weija board and none of you think that you're moving the little like glass that picks the letters, but all of you are a little bit right like you're just not kind of aware of the micro movements, and that moves the thing around the board and creates the illusion that some spirit
is moving your hands. Right, That's that I think people are generally aware of that concept, yes, and the ideo motor effect is it explains actually a lot specifically of things in early human like religious history, but not just that. And one interesting thing to me, you ever heard of dowsing? No,
this is still a thing today. It's not a thing I think most regular people know about in the twenty first century, but it's still something that's done all over the world, and it's a thing that has kind of been repeatedly invented in cultures around the world. And the idea behind dowsing is you've got this usually a forked wooden stick, and you like walk around with it because you're looking for water or you're looking for like an
underground mine, right, you think there's gold undergrounding. And as you're walking, if like the fork kind of dips in a direction, that's the dowsing rod finding water or whateverything you're looking for underground or underwater, right. And again it's the idea is that like there's some magnetic force that's pulling it down and tells you where you should dig.
Like the people who claim this is real tend to now say that there's a basis in science, there's not, and people have just been doing this for forever because it seems like it should work.
An should think this works.
Yes, my dad did this professionally when he was a young man. Like they were talking like the early eighties, you know. Yeah, so yes, people still.
Do doubt very cool, very cool.
And what's when because one thing dowsers will point out, because there are dowsers who like have a great record of like, well, this guy is using a dowsing rod
and he's found water all these times. Generally, what people tend to think is actually happening is that like these folks are also have just been traveling around and like looking for water long enough and have enough of an understanding of geology that kind of unconsciously when they suspect that somewhere is right their their hand is moving, you know, in favor of yes, yes, of just pseudoscience, very much of crediting the stick. Yes, very we'll talk more about
that like later. But dowsing goes back surprisingly far. We have ancient Chinese texts from about two thousand BCE or so, uh that depict Emperor you of Hasia of using a dowsing rod in something approaching the modern fashion. And there are even some archaeologists who will argue that a set of cave paintings in Algeria from about six thousand BCE also depict dowsing. That's highly debated. These guys might have just had bows and arrows. It's a cave painting, so
there's some room for debate. But Herodotus described a similar tool in use by the Scythians in the fifth century BCE. And there are a number of others suspected or confirmed cases of dowsing and dowsing adjacent behavior in civilizations around the world. And sometimes, you know, with the Scithians, I wouldn't be surprised if it traveled out of China. But there's evidence that different peoples have kind of figured out this basic idea independently, sort of like the bow and
arrow right. For whatever reason, this is just something that it seems natural to people. The practice was well known enough in the days of the Roman Empire that the New Testament even has a passage denouncing dowsing. From an article on the Archaeology Review blog by Carl Figans quote, my people consult their wooden idol, and their diviner's rod informs them for a spirit of Harley Tree has led them astray and they have played the harlot departing from
their God. And that's Hosea four twelve. So you're uh using.
Is stizing the Bible? Hey, whoa?
If we're comparing dowsing to ai, this is the first, Like this is an early pope encyclical against dowsing. It's Harlet's behavior sticks so people think about ladies. I don't think that's actually what it was saying, but in the funny wording, I just like the word harlot. So this is probably part of why dowsing rods became increasingly known
as witching rods in the Western world. If you've heard of a witching rod, it's the same idea, and they call it that because people thought it was the devil sometimes. And while the practice was banned at times in the Christian world during this period as a result, and even persecuted, this did not overly inhibit it spread. By the fifteenth century CE, Germans were using forked branches they called wishing rods to find ore veins in mountains. Or again, they're
not actually finding stuff with the sticks. The sticks don't work. That's just what they think is going on. In fifteen fifty six and a scholar and a mineralogist named Georgius Agricola wrote the earliest surviving illustrated account of dowsing as a professional practice. Now by this point, but the time old Georgie puts that down, we've had a documented history of about thirty five hundred years of humans using dowsing, maybe more, and enough people believe dowsing works, that it's
a common practice. But even in the fifteen hundreds, which is not an advanced era for scientific understanding, this guy, agrikaa is like, there's no way this is real, right, and he writes there are many great contentions between minors concerning the forked twig. For some say that it is of the greatest use of discovering veins, and others deny it. So we're already starting to like do some evidence base, you know, with shedding of doubts on this practice.
Well, they like guides like how to downce and like step two when it wiggles. I don't really know what is.
He he's the first one to write it down. We have to assume just given the nature of the way things were spread back then, mos dowsers would have been taught how to dows You're not getting like a guidebook with your first rod. You're an apprentice and you're being taught, you know. So Georgias was kind of the first person to document what was probably already standard wisdom within the field, if that makes sense, wisdom of the rod, the rod holding a stick and.
Saying the wisdom of the stick.
There was some of the stick beautiful.
I love it now.
I found all the information, most of the information about dowsing that I've read for you on a website called plus Value India, which had an article on the history of dowsing that seemed a lot less shady before. Yeah, so if he's going to show you the website, if you want to look at how reputable this source is. The pages three steps energize, three to five day delivery, transform your home's energy without breaking a single wall. Perfect,
and it's it's about healing crystals. It's about healing crystals. As that should make clear. The fact that this history of dowsing is on the website selling you magic crystals. Dowsing is wo right, This isn't real science. Dowsing rods don't identify gold or iron or water and pull in their direction. People unconsciously decide a particular area seems likely, and their hand moves unconsciously. If someone's intuition is good
or they're lucky, they find what they're looking for. And this process works often enough throughout history that it's kept alive, not just alive, but shockingly influential. In his article, Vegans notes that quote. Archaeologist and skeptic Jebcard writes in his Spooky Archaeology, which is a book, that one in eight archaeology instructors in the nineteen eighties were favorable to dowsing.
This is initially hard to accept. Dowsing is the kind of nonsense that was popular before people understood the ideo motor effect. But surely by the nineteen eighties we knew the practice was bupkiss and we did in the same way we know vaccines work. But the world at large has not always accepted that knowledge. Right, So the fact that like that many archaeology instructors in the eighties one
and eight. It's not most, but it's more than you'd guess, right believing in dowsing, she'd show you how hard it is to convince people even when there's never been and there's never been any good evidence dowsing works. Even despite that fact, despite how long we've known its nonsense, people were still buying it then and still today by people by the way.
Like the idea of a god like the years and you're like, okay, step one, hold the stick too, it wiggle like I'm just like step two is where a kid stuck? It moves? Wait until it moves? Is it like using the.
Around I think you're supposed to just kind of walk past the area and if it dips down, that's like the sign that something's there.
Right, there's some variance to this to your hand dipping.
You couldn't do it with a hand, that's just silly ed.
Yeah, okay, cool, right you.
I mentioned earlier that the wija board works by way of the idiomotor effect too, and it does. But the wija board is a new product. Any claims of ancient providence or just marketing. It is, however, based on an older idea, in quite in fact, a very old idea,
which is the magic or exploring pendulum. And if you were to if you were to get transported back in time to the days of ancient Rome and meet like someone claiming to be a fortune teller, they would probably do there's a good chance they'd do this where basically, you've got like a plate or a bowl that's engraved with pictures or letters or words or symbols that stand for something, and you hold this pendulum sometimes it's just like a metal ring on a string, and you hold
it above that and as the ideo motor effect makes it swing in a certain direction, you're saying, oh, the spirit is picking out different symbols or letters, and it's spelling out, you know, your fortune or whatever. It's answering
whatever question it's been asked to you. We have documentation of this practice dating back at least two three seventy one BC in Europe or BCE in Europe, according to an article on quack Watch quote, a question would be put to the priest, The movements of the ring would then be observed. When the ring was set in motion, it would swing towards one of the letters. This letter would be recorded, and the same process would be used to select another letter. Right, And that's you know, basically
how these things work. So how did dowsing stay relevant and seemingly credible up until the modern era, Whereas like the magic pendulum became a board game for children, right, even though it's the same amount of legitimacy. That is interesting, isn't it right that like one of these is a Parker Brothers game, and the others cut people pay for it, you know.
Is it because is it? Is it the client base? Because for the for the dowsing, it's the ore and the and the war. And I guess that there are those people and the others are seeking to communicate with the debt, right right, kids.
Right, and it But it is interesting that a bunch of like hard nosed oil and gas investors over the years have been fooled by something that, like most kids know, isn't really real, just because it's in a different it's it's presented to them in a different standard like situation. Right. I do think that's kind of telling.
Yeah, yeah, And I can kinnes see where you're going with this too, if it just does the appearance. Yeah's interesting. I sure hardly don't use this logic for bombs.
No, no, no, you see, you don't want to see this logic used for bombs. But if you want to know how this logic went from, you know, stuff that like fortune tellers and wizards would use and wound up in a bomb detector. The answer that starts with the spiritism movement of the mid nineteenth century we talked about. Jamie Loft has talked about this a lot on the show, one of the shows that she did for us. This is like around the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds,
you suddenly have seances become a big thing. Right, there's this burr explosion in all these different weird occult movements. Some of this does feed into the Nazis, some of it feeds into what's going to become the New Age
movement over here. But it's starting in like the eighteen forties and fifties with people trying to communicate with the dead, and in that period of time often believing that there might have been actual science to allowing people to communicate with spirits or the dead, because it's like eighteen forty eight, right, it's not a crazy thing to believe in eighteen forty eight based on the science of the times.
Yeah, we got into that at length on Ghost Church.
Ghost Church. Yes, Yes, that was Jamie show. So the first scientist to actually bust the magic pendulum and thus explain the ideomotor effect and bust all ideomotor related magical phenomena was a French dude named Chevrouel. Right, he's a scientist. In eighteen oh eight, he'd trained as a chemist and had thus read a standard textbook for the field written by a Strasburg professor who advocated using a magic pendulum to do chemical analysis. That's where science is at this
point in the early eighteen hundreds. If you're trying to analyze, like what different chemicals or anything, before you do like a chemical experiment, like where you're mixing shit together, you use like a fucking ring on a on a chain and the way it swings tells you what the innerals are. Right, so right and shiverwell. To his credit, he's one of these guys. He just seems to have kind of a
naturally scientific mind. So once he's his instructors tell him, and this is how you analyze what chemicals are in things. He's like, really, I don't that that's sure? Believe this right? Like, this isn't what we're doing, is it? This can't be right? So he he uses. But that said, when he uses the pendulum for the first time, it works, like he gets a chemical compound and he knows what it is, and somehow the pendulum swings the way it's supposed to when it's over that in order to identify it as
like mercury. Right, So he's given a plate to mercury, he knows it's mercury. Unconsciously, his hand makes the motion that is supposed to indicate that it's mercury.
Right.
So at first he's like, oh, fuck, maybe it does work, maybe I'm wrong, But again, being having a good scientific mind, he decides, I'm going to do some actual testing and I'm going to actually try to do kind of an early version of double blind testing. So he like puts a plate beneath the pitulum and the mercury and that
stops it, like the thing from swinging. And he also tests putting his arm on a support, which reduces the movements and kind of provides evidence that like, no, no, these are unconscious muscle movements.
I was thinking about that with the divining rod, you could test if it zero by having lack of cost or.
Something exactly exactly. And that's what he does, right, because he's a smart guy. Now, this prompts him to conduct the first double blind test on the IDEO motor effect and I'm going to quote again from that Quackwatch article. He blindfolded himself and then he had an assistant interpose to remove the glass plate between the pendulum and the
mercury without his knowledge. Under these conditions, nothing happened. Chevrouell concluded, so long as I believed the movement possible, it took place, but after discovering the cause, I could not reproduce it. His experiments with the pendulum show how easy it is to mistake illusions for realities whenever we are confronted by phenomena in which the human sense organs are involved under
conditions imperfectly analyzed. Interesting quote to think about when you read about like aich hat pods passing like turning tests and stuff. Yeah yeah, kind of an interesting yeah, thing to think on. So again, I do like stories about this guy because it gives you it's just one of these like you can really see a brilliant mind shining through history. This man was just too smart to believe what literally everyone else in his field said was true and was like, well, I'm just going to literally do
a basic test. No, everyone's wrong.
Yeah, this makes this does make me think of my work, which like fifty percent of the things I do are like, Okay, you keep saying this, did you look? Did you look? Did you look? Even once? And then you check and there's no proof, and they like, hey, job lost, really no proof of that. It's the businesses makes sense, time make that makes sense to all if you add up the numbers. History is so beautiful.
It's beautiful. It's that's why I was calling him in my head, chev rued Zitron. That didn't really work, chef Zitron. There, I could have tried so many different things work better than what I went with anyway, So Chevroell has correctly generalized that this same explanation illuminates what's really behind dowsing. He doesn't just call out, you know, the pendulum chemical analysis.
He's like, by the way people are using the same Dowsing's the same thing, obviously, But his findings did not initially spread widely, neither among the general populace, nor even among a lot of educated people. By the eighteen fifties, grifters and gurus were hosting regular seances and talking to the dead parties where magic pendulums were used to communicate with ghosts. The whole spiritist movement relied heavily on the
idio motor effect. Table turning was another common practice, and this was a Victorian era parlor game that took off after the famous Fox Sisters of Hydesville started claiming to communicate with spirits through knocks and taps on tables. In just a few years, the practice had evolved to table flipping,
which is described in the website Moon Mausoleum. This way, participants would sit around a small table fingertips lightly resting on the surface, and after a bit of concentration and maybe a ramatic chant or two, the table would begin to rock, tilt, and sometimes even levitate. And again, this is the ideo motor effect. And there's nothing wrong with this. This is basically everyone giving each other permission unconsciously to believe something silly and to have like a fun kind
of heightened experience. And there's nothing wrong with this if you're not taking this as serious evidence of like how the universe works, which people do because we're dumb. So the fact that folks are believing all of this drives a lot of scientists crazy, and part because science had just been invented and early practitioners of the field still believed it could compete long term with nonsense, which is
a rookie mistake anyway. One of these guys was the physiologist William Carter, and Carter argued that none of these idiomotor charades are evidence of ghosts, writing all the phenomena of the biologized state, when attentively examined, will be found to consist in the occupation of the mind by the ideas which have been suggested to it, and in the influence which these ideas exert upon the actions of the body. Carpenter, having described what's going on, coined a name for this
phenomenon in eighteen fifty two, the idio motor effect. That's where we get the name. Crucial to this whole process was his observation that the people participating in these table flipping games and rituals weren't lying generally or secretly manipulating the results that happened. Sometimes, like with the Hyde sisters, some of the people doing these are deliberately manipulating what's happening.
But when people are doing like a group of friends get together to do like a table flipping seance, usually nobody's secretly manipulating the results. They're just all kind of tricking each other, and most of them are unaware of their own contributions to moving the table. IDEO motor action then provided a non magical explanation for something that only seemed magic because participants were too close to the action
to see what was really going on right now. The original definition of the IDEO motor effect was the influence of suggestion in modifying and directing muscular movement, independently of volition. As before, the mere fact that table turning had been explained and the underlying and asn't behind it named didn't immediately change anything. So the next year, eighteen fifty three, a group of English scientists convened to find an explanation
for what had already been explained. The Internet maybe could have helped with this somewhat. There's a lot of people busting the same myths at the same repeatedly at the same time, because like, how do you know if some guy in London has already like named you know this effect, We're like.
Yeah, I guess they weren't sending each other letters. That wasn't like a place for check.
I mean they are sometimes, but you don't have a guarantee it's not like there's a someone can't just like find the results, and then suddenly it's instantaneously in journals around the world, Like you would have had to be exchanging letters with someone who knows that this is going on, right, you know who? I exchange letters with the sponsors of this podcast, you know, erotic letters. Honestly, we both wish I'd stopped sending them, but there's no way around stop.
I don't want to love our sponsors. I love our sponsors, you know.
Yeah, I mean that's how I pretty much interact with every better off line sponsor. They will get I sent some tyson Nuds as well. That's how we can come.
Right, that's right. And they keep telling me this isn't and only fans, Robert, you don't have to do that to the advertisers. But by god, you know I found their home addresses. I'm mailing them pictures of me.
But you want to do it. That's why you do it.
Uh huh, thank you, Ed, I want to thank you. Anyway,
here's some ads, ah, and we're back. So there were several leading theories as to like what was going on with the idio motor effect and these pendulums and these tables, right, but among the people who wanted to have like a scientific answer, but like hadn't read any of the explanations that were going around in eighteen fifty three, and the leading one was electricity, because in eighteen fifty three people knew electricity existed, but it was basically magic in most
of their minds. Right, So when you're asking, like, well, why is this thing moving when I hold it above this, it must be electricity. Gotta be electricity, right, Like it's the invisible powerful thing.
Yeah, it's just like a real.
Electricity vibes to me.
Man, I don't know die who only knows one scientific theory.
Baron Carl von Reichenbach credited Odick force, which he named after Odin and which he thought, well, this is one of my favorite things. So his ex Baron Reichen von Reichenbach's explanation for the idio motor effect is no, no, no, there's this odic force, and the way he describes it is just the force from Star Wars.
Right.
He believes all living things radiate energy, and some people are sensitive to it and can even manipulate it. And there's even positive and negative energies, or even a light and dark side of the odic force that.
You can learn to condition light and duk.
Yes he did, yes he did. Oh my god, I mean chairman.
But yes, And what year was this?
This is the eighteen fifties. Hell yeah, he he independently invented. George Lucas.
George looks like this is great. It just needs some more racist aliens.
Yeah, I need some aliens that look like they came out of dere Sturmer.
There's something about his middle name being Carl.
That's really funny. It's really funny. It's really funny. It's good stuff. It's his first name. It's just that he's the baron Carl.
That's not Bach.
So anyway, four doctors were tasked with investigating the science behind table turning in the United States, and despite all the theories around it, that came to the same conclusion as Carpenter, although they did not give it a cool name quote. The conclusion was formed that the motion was
due to muscular action, mostly exercised unconsciously. That same year in the United States, Michael Faraday conducted another prominent debunking of table turning, and by this point, the sheer weight of scientific consensus against this being real began to tell. Some regular people kept doing it, but scientists increasingly agreed it was nonsense. Some signiists a major exception was Russell Wallace. And this guy's such a crank. I want his background
to like be shitty, but it's not. Russell Wallace independently invented the theory of natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin. Like they published identically, and they both Darwin most people give more credit, but they both get credit because they both figured it out on their own pretty much, right, I mean, that's more complicated than that.
But what Wallace is a person who came up independently with the theory of natural He's a smart man, right, But in eighteen sixty five he fell headfirst into spiritism. Per quack Watch. He was seated with other sitters around a table. The table behaved in ways he was sure could not be entirely explained by Faraday's finings and Carpenter's
theory of video motor action. Right Basically, he initially he is like, yeah, obviously, of course, you know, I believe that what these these other scientists have debunked it is as clearly nonsense. And some folks are like Hey, you should actually go attend one of these seances for yourself and maybe you'll feel differently. And he does, and he's like, I was wrong. This is absolutely like amazing right now.
It is true the reading he went to didn't seem to work the way Faraday and Carpenter had described ideomotor action, because that wasn't what was going on. He was just being tricked by fake mediums who had a whole team of people hiding in different looks and crannies in the house to like make noises and create fake psychic phenomena.
That happened a lot too. But he makes the mistake of assuming that because this is different, that like the difference between what Faraday and Carpenter had seen what he had seen is because he'd seen real ghosts as opposed to maybe some guys tricked me, right.
So there was a concerted effort to trick him.
Though there was a concerted effort to trick him, and he didn't catch it right, And because Faraday and the other scientists hadn't described the exact kind of behavior he'd observed, he concluded skeptical scientists couldn't be trusted to analyze the paranormal because they just they wouldn't pay attention to the
real stuff. Doctor Ray Hyman, writing for quack Watch, calls this attitude loopholeism quote, the tendency to seek out each and every loophole in a skeptical account as a way to protect one's belief in a cherished supernatural or scientific.
I'm falling that shit away from the AI booster. Is that what's going on?
I thought, let's go, that's money.
That is hm, oh yeah, that's getting a lot of use.
That's a handy term.
M m.
Now, loopholeism is the kind of behavior you can mock is idiotic. But again, this is a legitimately brilliant man. What's really happening here is that loopholeism is the mechanism by which otherwise bright and even brilliant minds can trap themselves in nonsense. It provides a safety valve so that that sense of like internal like discrepancy between like what you know and what you're observing gets kind of turned off, right, That's what it allows you to do. It's how smart
people get trapped believing stupid things. That's what loopholeism is. So not only smart people Russell Wallace was one such mind, but another was Robert Hare, a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. In eighteen fifty three, when he was seventy two years old and Faraday published his debunking of table turning, Hair was again a brilliant chemist,
one of the great minds in his field. So when Faraday published this report, the Philadelphia Inquirer asked Hair for a comment, and Hair initially says like, yeah, fair Day's right, this is bogus, And that convinces one doctor Comstock and mister Amasa Holcomb, two men running a fake medium scam, to send this guy a letter and say, hey, if you're really a fair minded scientist, why not attend to seance? And the same thing happens again.
And another scam office.
And another scam artist too known con men right.
Oh man, one Air's.
Friends because Hair's like, obviously this is real, totally different than what the other guys saw. And one of his friends is like, was it possible that they were like conning you? And Hair is like, of course not. They're men of good character. I know they're men of good character because when I them, they seemed like men of good character, you.
Know, they seem like good fellas.
They would enlighten me about ghosts, and his logic was literally, well, they told me they spent hours every week asking spirits for information, and men of a good character wouldn't waste all that time if it was a trick.
But that's like a classic scam. They they skept what they scammed him in scientific ways.
So good, but they.
Were like, yeah, you know whether or not, like belief in goes separately to this does. But this is just a very classic scam of.
Ingratiation, justice scam, justice.
Ingratiate the mark. But yeah, don't worry. I did the seance real scientific like, and I spent hours talking to the ghosts. Yeah, knowing that he'd never get asked for details about what the discussions might be, right right, Hell yes, this rocks.
So Hair goes off the fucking deep end. After this, he writes a book in eighteen fifty five with a very long title We did not know how to title book. Stand then Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations demonstrating the existence of spirits and they're communion with mortals, doctrine of the spirit world respecting Heaven, hell, morality and God, also the influence of Scripture on the morals of Christians. Rolls off the tongue again, man, like the first couple of words.
Experimental Investigations of the spirit manifestations Boom, there you go. That's all we needed. That's all we need, you know. Or Experimental investigation of spirits boom, there's a title, you know. I'm just trying to help you out here, man. Anyway from that quack watch piece describing this fucking book. Before undertaking his research into spiritualism, Hair tells us he was
a materialist and an atheist. He describes in detail the various experiments he conducted that to him, proved the existence of the spirit world. He himself developed mediumistic powers. During these experiments, Hair claimed he had communicated not only with the spirits of his departed relatives, but also those of George Washington, John Quincy, Adams, Henry Clay, Benjamin Franklin, Lord Byron, and Isaac Newton.
Lord Byron.
Huh, Lord Byron, Lord Byron.
Okay, Lord Byron. What did Lord Byron.
Have to say about yah shaked fuck his wife? Okay, that's what Lord Byron did?
They got it? Math, Your wife. No, I want to know about spirits and stuff times. Yeah, the wife, the wife situation, the wife, the white man. Let's discuss the wife situation before you get to spirits.
So he also created a device that sounds like a direct precursor to the wija board quote. The spirit scope, as he called it, consisted of a pasteboard disc slightly larger than a foot in diameter. Around its circumference, he attached the letters of the alphabet in a haphazard order. An arrow that swiveled at the center of the disc was used to select letters one at a time by pointing toward them. For his initial test, he had a
medium sit opposite him at a table. The disc was placed between hair and the medium such that Hair could see the letters and the movements of the arrow, but the medium could not. The medium sat with her hands on a surface above the table, which, through a system of police cords and weights, was attached to the arrow such that slight pressures of her hand would cause it to move in various directions and point to letters. Hair asked if any spirits were present. The arrow pointed to
the letter why, indicating yes. Hair next asked the spirit to provide the initials of his name. The index pointed to R and then to H. Hair asked, my honored father. The index pointed to why. Now, Hair hadn't really figured out the secret to contacting the dead. He thought he had be well, she can't see the letters, so it's
got to be a spirit. But while this medium couldn't see the letters he was looking at, she could see his face, and thus she could move her hand to modify where the thing landed based on his response, and she was huh, right, yes, it's just it's the same set of principles. Right, And Hair even realizes she's not necessary because he starts operating the spirit scope alone and it still works, and he's like, that must really mean it's real, And no, man, it's just the same. It's the ideo motor effect.
And also just be I assume that also wouldn't so the medium could control.
The thing, yes, yes, when he was doing it with him, Yeah.
And thus the medium would know what letters corresponded to what hand.
Well if he as he's saying like he's because he's reading the letters, and if she gets to why and he's like, oh does that mean why? And she's like, yeah, yeah, that's where I want.
To Oh, so he was prompting her.
Yes, yes, there a degree of that going on. Yeah, always the case with shit like this.
Why Yeah, it's asking why you want to know?
Right exactly. So the decades go by and science gains a robust understanding of how all this stuff works, regular people continue to fall for it, but it's at least less commonly accepted and educated halls that said this still a lot of people periodically. One famous example from the twentieth century is the case of Clever Hans, a German horse.
In the early nineteen hundred two, it was claimed had been taught to do math, tell time, read and write, and a bunch of other things that horses cannot do.
And so I'm just going to show you here's clever Hans, and what you've got is basically his owner would point to, you know, if you wanted to have Clever Hans give people the answer to five times four, right, he would point to five times four, and then Hans would start stomping until he reached twenty right, thus showing that Hans knew how to do five times four, and Hans could indeed do stuff like this, And so people were like, what else could that be but a horse knowing all
of these things right. However, as with table reading, once clever Hans became really famous, there's a commission that gets
formed to study him. So the first thing they do, being scientists, is separate him from his owner, and there do a bunch of tests and they're able to show that while other people can get Hans to successfully give correct answers, to which at first seems well, maybe that really does mean Hans knows what he's doing, but further study showed Hans only gets answers correct if the person asking him the question knows the right answer and Hans can see them. Right, those two things have to be
in place, right. In other words, Hans doesn't know what five times four is, or what three times three is, or what two plus two is. Hans knows when he starts tapping at a certain point. The person asking him a question gets really excited if they know what the answer is, because that's the answer, and then he stops and he gets rewarded. Right, that's what Hans is reacting to. So one thing this shows, which is legitimately of scientific interest,
is that horses are very empathetic. Right, Hans doesn't know math or anything or science or anything else, but he knows when people are excited and happy with his performance, and that's what he's reading for. Right. Does that make sense?
Yeah? To. Honestly, Hans does sound clever.
He's clever. He is. He's a smart horse, just not in the way people thought.
Right. I also like the reason I laughed so hard was the idea of a like a panel or a committee, like a bunch of guys got together.
How smartness horses or like?
Was there an alarm of like a horse is becoming intelligent really smart? Yes? There was.
People were like, wait a second, what's going on here?
The thinking of like an early version of sorry to bother you?
Yeh, yes exactly. Now this is not the video motor effect, but it's relevant for a reason I'm going to bring up in a second.
I do.
I should let you know, clever Hans gets found out right, like people realize what's going on? Not long before World War One, and for his many crimes, he was eventually drafted into World War One and was killed in action in nineteen sixteen and immediately eaten by starving German infantry. This might not seem like it's this. I know, that's kind of bleak. It's World War One cat, that's a fever.
This may not seem like the same deal as dowsing, and it's not the ideomotor effect, but the human psychology behind it is very similar. Whether it's a horse or a forked stick. We're the ones with the answers, and we just convince ourselves something else is at play. Right today in the twenty first century, Clever Hans is a fun, old timey story, but people are still just as easily tricked by animal behavior. And I'm going to have a
brief digression to talk about police dogs here. But first, you know who never gets police dogs called on them? He the sponsors of this podcast because they bribe the police. We don't know this, I can't and we're back, so we're talking about cop dogs. This is a digression, but it's very relevant to the story of Clever Hans because if you had an education like I did and ed you, you grew up in the UK, So I don't think
you guys had deer cops. But did you have cops come into your class to talk about how dangerous drugs were?
Uh? No? They one time came in and showed us that guns were scary.
Okay, that's good. Kids should know that.
They also let us rack a pump action shotgun, which is not a good idea, yeah, because like everyone was like, wow, these things seem really scary, and you go you're like fuck, yeah, yeah, horrible. It all boys private school where it was the dumbest kid as well, so it's like, maybe don't show any of these children this.
Yeah, it's a bad idea.
But thankfully we don't have a second Amendment, which is a great thing considering.
Considering, but it is the same thing with like drugs and with guns, where if you bring them into a school, some number of kids will be like, these things are kind of cool. Right, So my education, I had a deer cop come into our class and tell us about drug and he also talked to us about canine units, right, and how they would find if you had even a sprinkle of wheat in a full car or a locker, a dog can sniff it out. That's how good their
noses are, right, you can't hide anything from dogs. They're almost supernatural. How good they are at smelling out drugs, And that sounded plausible. Most people just believe that you know without thinking further about it, because dog noses really are that good. A blood can't hound is capable of picking out a tiny amount of wheat in a locker or a backpack or whatever. But that doesn't mean that's what's happening when a canine unit alerts and says there's
drugs or a bomb somewhere. In twenty eleven, the Chicago Tribune went through three years worth of cases where cops had used drug dogs to find drugs and cars in the area per NPR quote. According to the analysis, officers found drugs or paraphernalia in only forty four percent of cases in which the dogs had alerted them When the driver was Latino, the dogs were right just twenty seven percent of the time. That seems worse than guessing.
Did they just train the dogs to be racist as well?
No, that's the best part maybe, but that's not the thing that is to blame for this specific thing. Ed So, when the Tribune reached out to the cops and was like, this seems kind of fucked up. If these dogs are so good, why is this happening and why are they less accurate on like people that the cops might be racist towards UH and the dog handling officers responded first by saying, well, you can't measure our accuracy based on the number of alerts that find drugs, right, dog noses
are too good. So if they alert on a car and say there's drugs and then we don't find drugs in the car, it's just because there used to be drugs in there.
And so you're saying you can't measure our effective by how effective we.
Are, right, right, these things are probable cause if a dog alerts on your car, and this is how much they suck at their fucking jobs. And I'm not blaming the dogs again, the dogs are doing a Clever Hans.
This is the thing people talk about dogs the old dogs are good boys. I think we've statistically proven that that's not true today.
Ed it's not the dog's fault because what's happening again, it's the same. It's the same as with Clever Hans. Because what's happening here is the dogs when they get up to a car they see their owner gets excited where the owner thinks there are drugs. And if the owner thinks or if their handler thinks there's drugs, so if the cop pulls over a car that's been driven by a Mexican dude, and he assumes this guy's got to have drugs on him. The dog's going to alert
because he sees the owner wants him to alert. Dogs are really good at knowing what we want. And dogs have no idea what alerting on a car means for the people in the car. Of course, they don't understand that they're dogs. What they know is that they make their owner happy if they alert on the car, because their owners are racist piece of shit, and that's what they're doing. That's how cop dogs work.
That's so horrible. But I retract my statements about dogs being I cannot Unilactually, styled dogs are good, but these are not necessarily bad.
These are not necessarily their fault. All right, dogs are good, Yeah, and your dogs are good.
They're great.
But what I do find funny is that when the Tribune talked to cop dog like cop trainers, the cop trainers were like the people who trained cop dogs were like, oh, it's the the dogs just smelled drugs that had been there. But when the Tribune talk to people who are like experts on dogs, like specifically like people who are like actual actually study dogs professionally, like Lawrence Myers, a professor
from Auburn University who studies canine units. He told them, quote, dog handlers can accidentally que alerts from their dogs by leading them too slowly or too many times around a vehicle, and a lot of times owners, by the way, the handlers know this. So sometimes this isn't even the dog innocently alerting to please the handler. Sometimes the handler knows if I walk around this area three times, the dog will automatically alert.
Oh so the dogs thoughts freaking out. I say, that's fucked up.
That's so it's fucked up. And in that same interview, Myers that the drug dog expert brings up clever Hans. He's like, that's what's happening a lot of time with canine units. Now, that same year, a researcher named Lisa Litt had published an actual scientific study on the efficacy of canine units. She'd tested the abilities of fourteen sniffer dogs and secretly they're handlers, right. She'd told the handlers, Hey, in this specific test, there's a cocaine target sent in
the car. So the handlers went in knowing they were supposed to be cocaine, but she hadn't actually put the target sent there so that the owners were told it was there. The handlers were told it was there, so they thought it was there, and even though it wasn't, their dogs tended to alert that it was there because the handlers expected it and had been told a scent was nearby, which kind of proves that they're full of shit, right.
The study damaged Lit's career, even though it was brilliant, because it pissed off dog trainers, cops and put it risk the entire way that a lot of law enforcement works in the US, because a canine alert counts as probable cause. Now, ultimately, after years, it did inspire some trainers in some departments to adopt more rigorous standards to control for this kind of bias, but there's been absolutely
no systemic reform anyway. That's a digression, but I want you to remember it because this is not going to be the last or the only time in this story that something like this goes down. But back to Clever Haunts. After he gets eaten by those Germans and World War One ends, spiritism fades from relevance, and the IDEO motor
effect starts being taught in school and to science students. Right, Medical science and material science advances rapidly over the next decades, and the IDEO motor effects influence shrinks mostly to the field of parlor tricks and children's board games, and of course to dowsing. People continue to use dowsing rods all around the world, as they still do today right now.
At some point in the late nineteen eighties or early nineteen nineties, an enterprising inventor who will talk about in the next episode was playing a round of golf, probably while thinking about the IDEO motor effect. That's how I assume that this all came to pass what we're going to talk about next, because one constant annoyance when you're golfing is that you lose balls, right, and if you lose your ball, you lose strokes, right. They add strokes to your score. And it also costs money in time
because you have to pay for them. Right, So there's always been money in finding golf balls or convincing people you've developed a way that they can do that. Enter the gopher. Now, Sophie's going to show you what this
thing looked like. This is a gag gift. Primarily, it's an empty plastic box with a collapsible antenna that you can unfold from it and you spin it out and you like walk around where you think you lost your ball, and if you use it right, the antenna will drop to point at your missing ball.
Right.
It's the same as all of this shit works. And Sophie's got an example of the package of this product that starts being sold in the late eighties early nineties. Them is amazing. Yeah, a video you need that that hasn't The guys at Red Lettering Media periodically will do like watch a bunch of old VHS tapes like this sort of shit and and make fun of them. I haven't seen them get the Gopher yet, but I'm looking
forward to it like every day. Yeah, the perfect gift for the golfer who has everything quick and easy to operate. Just like a magnetic compass needle which swings of its own accord to the north pole, the direction finding antenna of your gopher will swing of its own accord in the direction of a golf ball as soon as your shoulders line up with the ball. The gopher does not generate or transmit any harmful signals and is environmentally safe.
That part is true. It does not generator transmit any signals, well does it?
Does?
It just go nothing? It just moves with your hand. There's no there's nothing in there. There's no electronics, there's no battery. It does nothing. It's just a box with an antenna on it.
What the fuck?
It's just a lie.
Don't look.
But hey, according to the packaging, it can be used by right or left.
Handed people and even underwater.
Even underwater cool. Yeah, in deep rough or the bush. Yeah, looks like a great product. So we're going to talk about the Gopher more in part two because, as a spoiler, the Gopher directly leads to the deaths of hundreds and hundreds of Iraqi civilians nice and not just civilians in Iraq, in a lot of places, you know, to be fair,
but mostly Iraq. So we'll tell the story about how this gag gift that doesn't help people find golf balls becomes like a multi tens of millions of dollars defense product that leads to huge numbers of deaths during the war in Iraq. But that's next episode. Ed, how are you feeling in this episode? Into Part one?
I'm feeling confused, but also validated. The history is full of people just getting fucking swindled by complete dog shit, just complete nonsense.
Yeah, yeah, absolute crap. We're so bad at learning when things are like complete bullshit. I love it, I love it.
I love it. We've learned nothing.
We've learned nothing except ed you've learned how to make a damn good podcast. Do you want to tell our listeners where they can listen to it?
Better offline dot com? Listen to my goddamn podcast. We do in a monologue, We do interviews, We do more monologues. We do a lot of monologues. Join the subreddit, readman uslet where's your ed dot where's your head dot? At is the newsletter? Just join me, join them the various platforms.
Yeah, excellent. All right, everybody, let's all go to the not here until it's time for part two. Goodbyee.
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