Listener Mail: Media and Memory

Mercantile in Manhattan. Stuff you missed in history class has a show right before us, so you can really double down, learn more and buy your tickets today at New York Comic Con dot com slash NYCC hyphen presents Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How Stuff Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Christian Seger, and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, it is time for another listener

Maile episode. It's been a while since we did one, right, guys, Yeah, it's been a while since Carney has come out of his layer to greet us. With various bits of listener mail from our our our listeners all over the world. Carney's has some life changes recently, though, right guys, Well, Carney I believe has a crush Carney the mail Bot, of course, if you're not familiar, Formerly Arnie the mail Bot.

With the addition of Cartesian doubt, we became Carney. And now I think he has learned to love because I've seen him writing the name of another machine here in the office, if y'all, if you'll notice, I noticed somebody etched a serial number really long, went into the wall with a saw of some sort. That would be Carney. I get a big heart around it, Honestly, I try

to stay out of the whole thing. They both tried to get me into a room to mitigate the whole situation the other day, and I just you know, I'm busy to a podcast. Sorry, Carney, you don't want to get into machine politics. Well, maybe by the end of today's episode he and the coffee machine can work it out. I hope so, I hope so. But for now he needs to do his job, that's right, and that is to spit out listener mail for us. And it's and we need a note here that we receive a great

deal of listener mail. We we get it in on the email, we get it through the various social media accounts. We get it lots of cool feedback on the discussion module our group on Facebook. These are all tremendous ways to get in touch with us. Occasionally, even some snail mail comes in, but not a lot. Uh, no reason you should stop. Actually do some stuff from Twitter this time. Oh yeah, cool, I know we see stuff on tumbler even so. The bottom line is we receive a great

deal of cool stuff. We try to respond to to a lot of it, but there's a lot that we can't even you know, we don't have time to respond to. But we do like to have Carney bring us some choice bits of listener mail so that we can read them on the air and and discuss the questions. The answers are just sort of basking, you know, the the glory of the moment. Well, time is precious, so let's get right into it. I can see he's spitting one

out right now. All right, what's it look like? This came in on the discussion module that group on Facebook that we were talking about that all of you are welcome to to join in on uh. Darwin writes in and says you mentioned on the podcast last week that perhaps the living in a simulation trope might someday replace

the alien abduction narrative. Last week on BBC's Infinite Monkey Cage, Brian Cox, this is the the younger scientists, Brian Cox, This isn't the classic character actoran not Manhunter anyway, Cox and his panel discussed this very topic, even submitting that such a belief bordered on the same leap of faith

that is required for religious beliefs. I think it is fascinating, even though I doubt that you would be able to create certain physical phenomena as we observe them using digital methods, the problem of pseudo random versus truly random physical events. Of course, maybe with highly advanced technology is required to recreate a universe such limitations and uh maybe surmountable. It is endlessly fascinating topic and I would love to hear you guys weigh in on it at some point. Well.

Speaking of Cartesian doubt, this is actually a good point for it, because we talked about this during the Mandela Effect episode. This is where I believe this This came up, and then you guys also did it in a what was Your Computer Simulated? Episode? Was that the created universe is one yes. In the episode where we talked about creating a universe in the lab, we also talked about the idea of creating a universe and a computer simulation

and how you could know that. I'm skeptical about this idea. I voiced some of my skepticism in that episode, and we actually got some replies about that. We several people send us really interesting emails about that. I'm going to

try to read at least one of those today. And Darwin here mentions the alien abduction episode, and yeah, in that one, we were talking about this, this trope of of alien abduction being the narrative that you draw in when trying to make sense of some sort of you know, paranormal sensory experience, and to what degree we might replace that in the future with something like the idea that our reality is a computer simulation, Like, at what point would there be a tipping point at which this would

become the default or one of the default narratives for some people understanding what happened? Syndia being that like the matrix would sort of replace alien abduction as these the narrative of explanation for these things that we have no scientific explanation for. Well, wait a minute, then what is

the experience narrative there? So if an alien abduction, it's you know, there's certain patterns of like I woke up, I was in a room surrounded by beings, I was taken up into another place, X, Y, and Z happened to me. What what's the simulated universe version of that? Well, Joe, I was. I was coming back from from the joint uptown a few nights back, and suddenly everything got a little flashy, and the next thing I knew, these uh,

these people were come infor me. I think what had happened is that I had I had glitched out of the computer simulation for a moment. The anti virus software is on your case, Yeah, they're on my case. I think I might have flopped out of the future tank that I'm that my actual body is positioned in. So they put me back in and they've done something to my memory. But I did get to see through the veil and see through the computer simulation that we all

buy into every day. This is an actual argument that a few people have have proposed as an explanation for the Mandela effect, that we exist within a kind of like hollow deck simulation, and that when the Mandela effect is observed by people, it's because there's some glitch in the software. We do not buy it. Our episode strongly argues that the Mandela effect is just a false memory and false memory shared false memory. The amazing part about

it is what it reveals about the inner working of memory. Well, yeah, didn't we get at least one email from someone who is fairly angry arguing that it's more likely that we live in parallel universes or a glitchy simulation then that people misremember things. I thought that was just you, you're trolling Probert and me, but it maybe it was a real person. I don't know. I think it's kind of

likely that people really often misremember things. Well, yeah, I think that we make a strong case for that, and it's it's connected to the alien abduction episode two. We've had kind of like a false memory theme going for the last month. Okay, well, I've got at least one more email about the idea of living in a computer simulation. I mentioned that we this came up in our episode about how to create a universe in the Lab. Now, a lot of that episode was on the physics idea.

It was that we talked about one book in particular, but the work of cosmologists like Alan Gooth over the years about how it might hypothetically be possible. It seems like kind of a stretch, but there are plausible physical hypotheses about how you might be able to do an experiment in high energy particle collider that could create a universe in the lab. But we also talked about the idea of creating a universe as a simulation on software, and I talked about multiple reasons I don't think this

is likely that our universe is a simulation. Uh number one, It would just require so much energy to simulate a realistic universe. Why is that something that we think future civilizations would spend their limited resources on. Well, well, because well yeah, but also a lot of people spend their limited resources now on simulated worlds. You just you have to extrapolate it to like a global economy where just batteries, man,

I mean, they're just taking our energy right back. Just thinking about the information density of simulating an actual world with actual physics that works. I mean, one of the problems is you can do science experiments and the laws of physics always seem to hold. So that means at some level they're simulating everything all the way down. It's not just like a low res simulation with some kind of put together sprites. At the higher level, they're simulating

every physical interaction of every atom and molecule. Well, that just seems like that would be so energy intensive, it's ridiculous. So I'm gonna I'm just playing defl's advocate here. I agree with you, But like I immediately think of like rag doll physics in like the video games I play, like like sky Rim or Fallout or something like that. Right, right, that's a very limited version of what you're talking about, which are just orders of magnitude simpler than simulating real physics.

And what I was saying is the easiest way to simulate real physics would just be to have a real universe. Well, one of the things that we brought up in that episode, I think was was the issue of mirrors and video games. If you see a working mirror in a video game, you're probably you're seeing a great deal of work place and all, and some of the times you're actually seeing some trickery to you know, to because there's no light in a video game. You don't have photons in a

video game. But to have this kind of simulation that Joe is talking about, you would need to have that. I had another objection to the idea of that, that we're living in a simulated universe, and it went sort of like this, Um, if we are living in a simulated universe that perfectly mirrors a real universe, we should be able to create a simulated universe within our simulated universe, and then within the created simulated universe, they should be

able to create a universe within the simulated universe. If this is all running on hardware that is upstream of the simulations that go all the way down, you'd eventually reach a sort of peak information density that the hardware at the top could no longer sustain. And that's where this next email comes in. So this comes from our

listener Jared, who says, Hi, guys, love the show. I was listening to your Out of Chaos podcast and had a few thoughts pertaining to the computational requirements of complex simulation UM and he calls the section relative relativity of our programmer God's time. I work on virtually prototyping satellite imaging systems by simulating photo realistic imagery, taking into account the physics of the imaging system and the lights interaction with the observed scene. Now I can do a pretty

darn good job simulating imagery with any computer. It just takes longer given a less powerful computer. Maybe the being simulating us have a lot more time, so an hour in their time is a second in hours, Or they have us turn off for the night and start us back up in the morning for maintenance. My simulations don't

notice any or my temporal discontinuity. Also, now the beings want to create a simulation inside their simulation, sure, but they have finite computing power too, so it will go extremely slow relative to the original programmer gods, and the embedded simulations will asymptotically approach some constant computational requirement. I thought that was really interesting, but he goes on. Another solution is to give your world some natural equalizer, like

an ego. I'd argue the past three years, as humans have gotten way more computationally complex, the loss of biodiversity has made the earth as a whole way less computationally complex. Someday we'll have some computationally tricky doomsday device which will solve its own computational problem. Uh. And then he goes on to just say some very nice things about our show and and all that, and we appreciate the flattery,

but really especially appreciate these ideas. I think I'm not convinced by them that we do live in a computer simulation, but I think that is a reasonable objection to my time of computation and information density objection. I have another one too. They just came to mind hearing just just just a spring off of this fantastic response, is that you know, we we can. We can easily think of like a whole world simulation and all the inherent problems there,

a multi user situation and all the problems there. But how about this. The next time you're in a small windowless, mirror less bathroom, I think, what if this is the simulation and it began basically the moment I walked in here. Yes, like this is when the simulation kicked on. Everything else is just you know, false memory essentially, and the simul nation is going to end when I flush the toilet. It's it's kind of like if you're filming a TV series and you don't have a lot of money for

an episode to do what a bottle episode? Right? So that's maybe that's how the our far future selves are dealing with this, Like we can't actually recreate the twenty one century, but let's just do a bathroom scene because bathrooms from the twenty one century were pretty cool, and that will immerse the single user in that world, and giving the entire world full of people false memories actually would help, because this goes right along with what y'all

were saying about the failures of memory related to the Mandela effect. Memory is very low resolution compared to reality. It's incredibly low resolution. It's you know, so you It would not be all that computationally difficult to supply somebody with the vague kind of memories people actually have, but

they have the illusion that their memories are vivid. This may explain why sometimes when I go into the bathroom, I imagine what life would be like if I was stuck in there forever, Like like how would I sleep on the floor? Would I drink water from the sink?

Would I bathe? In the toilet, et cetera. I would say, next time you are in a work meeting that seems to go on forever, you should contemplate the possibility that the universe actually began at the beginning of this meeting, and the rest of your life up until this point is just an inserted false memory at low resolution to justify you listening to this pitch about how you're going to optimize your new whatever your seo. Dude. Yeah, and then then you get to snap back into it and

try and remember what the person was telling you. Sounds good. All right? We got another one related to uh, I think Carney's hand in one do you Oh hey, oh this is sharp okay. Oh, this is one about our samurai swords episode. Oh no, wonder okay. So this is from Steve and he says, enjoyed your program on Japanese

katana swords. Thanks. I think the development that you skipped over was the reintroduction of swords as standard equipment for officers and sergeants during the period just before World War Two. Most of these individuals were not samurai class and did not own swords, so mass produced pieces were issued to them. These so called showato were distinguished by minuki of three imperial chrysanthemums rather than the traditional heraldic manuki of older swords.

Most were destroyed during the occupation, but many survive. So what Steve's referring to here is a study that we looked at during our Samurai Swords episode that took a sword that was recovered from presumably some battle during World

War Two, so this was the nineteen forties. The U. S Army commissioned a metallurgical composition composition study of the sword to determine how it was smith and they found that the sword that they had recovered was actually significantly lower in quality than they had been led to believe from the history of sword smith things specifically for katanas, like if I remember correctly, like the carbon composition was off by percentages, the angle of the sword wasn't right way,

things like that. So it seems like Steve is telling us here why that's the case. They had this entire other line of swords that were made specifically for the Big War. That's interesting. Yeah, that did not come up in in our episode, but that adds a little more background to what they were observing here. Yeah, and so

like let's let's try to apply this to a fictional example. Okay, so we talked about kill Bill in the Samura Swords episode when uh the Bride is fighting the Crazy eighty eight with her like super awesome samurai sword that is is smithed in the very traditional way, so it's both sharp and flexible and has a has a solid core. Right, she's able to cut in half. Other warriors swords from

the Crazy eight eighty eight attack her. So maybe they've got these mass manufactured showato swords, but she's got the real deal. She's got hottri Hanzo steel. Crazy eight eight should have really paid more attention to their true gear, but it's probably exactly. Yeah, each sword is priceless, so that's priceless times eight. Yeah. And I guess the argument too is it's like, if you're whaling on someone with the A eight Samurai swords, they don't they really don't

even need to be sharp. They can you don't even take to take them out of the sheath. Yep. But thank you, Steve, I really appreciate that that clarifies that way we assumed, I think in that episode that there was something along those lines that probably like late uh, nineteenth century and early twenty century katanas were not of the same Make all right, We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we will get some more listener mail from Carney and share it with the

rest of you. All Right, we're back. We have a little bit of listener mail here dealing with the episode that Joe and I recorded, The buddhais a Mountain, which was a pretty pretty fun episode about the Lashawn Buddha, the giant Buddha uh at one of fines in China, this enormous humanoid structure that has been carved into the mountain itself, lording over the river below, kind of like Stone Mountain here in Georgia. Well we we do. I

think Stone Mountain came up in that. Actually, that was a very interest less racist Well that this was a very interesting episode because it did come out ahead of a lot of the a lot of the political discussions have been going on regarding monuments and statues here in the United States. Yeah, I guess I didn't even think about that really, but maybe we did get a little

listener mail about that. But yeah, we talked in the episode about the idea of statuary being a type of depiction that inherently carries like a like a moral valence to it. It's like if you were to have a photograph of somebody or have well maybe not a photograph, I don't know, But if you like write a book about somebody, it's not assumed that you think that person was a good person. You might write a book about

a serial killer or a horrible dictator. But if you put up a statue of a person, it is just part of our cultural uh language, that that is a thing of honor. You never put up a statue of somebody you don't like. Yeah, you know, we I think we we barely if it all discussed Confederate monuments in that episode, because again it was before it really picked

up as a topic here. But I do encourage anyone out there who's interested in that topic to listen to that episode because it's kind of an interesting way to think about it about a controversial topic free of the actual, um, you know, current events. But the bit of listener, may I'm gonna read here doesn't concern anything happening here in America. It concerns something happening in China and concerns some of the local accounts of the Leshan Buddha. We heard from

a listener by the name of Danny. He's an American with a with a company in Shandu, and they he has his staff listen to our podcast to improve their English. Oh no, sorry, sorry staff, No no, he says. He says, they get a lot of a lot of great stuff out of it, out of it and they enjoy They really enjoyed the episode. Uh, since it related to something

local to uh. So he said that he had they had no corrections aside from the fact that, uh, the mountain itself it is you may Shawn Shawn mining mountains, so you you may mountain if you will. But then he he went on to share some various tidbits from a local inhabitants about basically bits of folklore related to the Lashan Buddha. Uh. And he he adds that we don't actually believe any of these points, but a lot of sexilantees do, and they are relatively well known things

that are said of the Buddha. Um. He said. They also give a little insight into how even modern day Chinese mythology bends up the line between the animate and the inanimate. So I'm just gonna run through these. I found these tremendously fascinating. Apparently the Buddhist facial expression changes in reaction to tragic events in China. First, he points

to the lashaan Giant Buddha closed tears event. That's that's a translation from Chinese, where apparently the Buddha closed his eyes and shed tears for all the lost souls as a result of the nineteen fifty nine through sixty one famine, which killed between fifteen and thirty million people. Uh. He says the Buddha was seen to look very angry in nineteen seventy six, in the year when mal Zadong died.

In the same year, the same year that Tangshan earthquake killed thousands of people, says, the Buddha also apparently expresses joy or pride for China as well. His head started to glow with a pulsating light in the year two thousand, when China joined the w t O and made the bid to host the two thousand eight to Beijing Olympic Games. Another one that they found this kind of a random

thing that they found on the internet in Chinese. He points to an event that supposedly happened on May seventh, two thousand two, in the morning when there's suddenly there were dark clouds around the Buddha and suddenly there appeared at a halo like phenomenon. The rising sun flashed around the statue with a diameter of about three creating a colorful halo of light. He says. In two thousand eight,

after the earthquake, the Buddha was seen crying. Uh. It says this one a lot of people believe, and there are even pictures online. So this is kind of like when we get um like like stigmata effects on like statues or something like that. Or I'm thinking also of like, um, have you guys ever heard of like manifestations of Jesus and like everyday objects. When I was living in a Massachusetts there was one of these that happened in I think it was Malden, Massachusetts, and uh, it was in

a Catholic hospital window. There was like a manifestation that looked like it was Jesus, but it was like some kind of smoke damage or something to the window. Well, I said, I would definitely say that with Lashawn Buddha. Given the irrigation system that's worked out around it. I mean it would make sense that it would appear to weep certain sometimes. Uh. He also points out he says, quote, it's often said that there is also a treasure built

into the statue behind his heart, ears and eyes. No one can tell me what the treasure is supposed to be, but I would not be all too surprised if something was there because of the mystical powers that Chinese myth gives to many minerals, such as Jade's ability to transcend the realm of the living sometimes something I think you guys have covered before in a previous episode. Yeah, we talked about that in the Jade Burial Suit episode. We

sure did. So. I love these tidbits. They really they really had to add a little more depth than a little, you know, local intel to our episode. And I had to read this one too. After he shared the following, Please feel free to read any of this on the podcast, in whole or in part, including my name. If you do, I will take the whole company out for a day to go visit the Buddha and we will bring you back some pictures. Awesome. Yeah, do it so? Yeah? I

want to see some pictures. Yeah, it's always great, because you know, we can sit here in in Atlanta, Georgia and do research until our eyes bleed and pull up a bunch of facts and then present them to you the audience. But if you're actually physically close to some of these things, like academ Gora doc, we received a bunch of mail from people who who have visited there before. You know, it's it's especially helpful for us to hear these firsthand accounts. All right, what do you have next

for us there, Karney? So we got one coming in from Allison about science communication. This is going back to our episode about science communication from after Robert went to the World Science Festival in New York. Oh, yes, science communication breakdown. Wait is that a led Zeppelin reference? I think it may have been an accidental led Zeppelin reference.

Communication breakdown, but that was what the episode was about, like, you know, breakdowns in the communication of science and scientific news scientific topics to yeah public, especially as it relates

to climate change. Uh, let's see what else vaccines? Yeah, I mean a lot of it was related into the idea that people are not necessarily convinced by facts and evidence, that there's a lot of psychology about what actually causes people to make their minds up about controversial issues, and that it's there's a lot of social aspects and cultural identity wrapped up, and how we take sides on issues that there appears to be some controversy about, and about

how how we can deal with that in science communication. But anyway, Allison has a fantastic question and something we actually deal with a good bit, i'd say, She says, Hi, guys, I've enjoyed your show for a long time, but only

recently had a good excuse to send an email. You recently did an episode on the science communication breakdown, and I was wondering if in your research you came across any good idea or theories about how science communicators should address the way that scientific facts change as our understanding evolves. For example, for a very long time, nutritional scientists have pushed the idea that carbohydrates are a good energy source for humans, while fat was associated with a bunch of

different health problems. Recently, though, our understanding of nutritional science has begun to change. Perhaps fat won't kill you, and perhaps carbs are more detrimental to health than anybody wanted to admit. I've seen a lot of people express a sense of betrayal over this reversal of sentiments. How are you supposed to trust anything these scientists say? They wonder if a few decades down the line, they're going to

do a one eight on their position? How are science communicators supposed to convince the public to walk back from positions they have long been considered solid theory? Also, she says, if you guys haven't done an episode on ketosis, I'd love to hear your take on it. I've been living on fewer than twenty grams of carbs a day for two years, contrary to what the dietitians tell me, I've never felt better. Thanks so much for your educational entertainment, Allison.

So what she's talking about here reminds me of this Lewis Black bit that you guys have probably heard before, and I've even referenced it on the show before, where he's like, So, when I was growing up, there were these studies and they said milk is good for you. You gotta drink milk. Drink milk. And then all of a sudden there are studies and they said milk is

bad for you. Don't drink so much milk. You gotta take the fat out of the milk, right, And then all of a sudden it turns around again, milk is good for you. Right. So these science studies seem to contradict one another back and forth, and this is essentially what she's getting at. Yeah, so I actually have several thoughts about this, one of the one of them is that this is partially an artifact of problems in science communication more so than science itself, though there are problems

with some aspects of the science. So a lot of times what will happen is there will be a new study that says, on lab rats, we found that if you give them this extremely high dosage of milk proteins over this many months, they have a sixty percent higher chance of having this effect than if you don't. And so then the people who are running like newspapers are doing the nightly news. I guess if this back in the nineties or the eighties or whatever, would say scientists

have discovered that milk will give you cancer. It is bad for you. Uh, And so they take this highly nuanced, kind of subtle effect that's been demonstrated in one experiment and turn that into an incredibly simple pronounced statement about what is good for you or what is bad for you, not really noting that maybe the effect was subtle, that the experiment was done on a certain number of animals

that weren't even humans, you know, stuff like this. Let me see if I can try to reverse engineer this too, from like a media literacy standpoint, because I think even for some members of our audience who might actually be scientists themselves, they don't uh necessarily know how that information

comes to us science communicators in the media. Right. So for instance, we get these press releases and it will say, uh, what was her example, Well, she brings up a fat versus carbs and the health effects there, Right, So we'll get a press release and it will say that and will have a link where you can go and you can read the full twenty page report. But sometimes just behind the paywall, yeah exactly. And sometimes your organization doesn't supply you with you know, the access to the databases

behind these paywalls. Sometimes you have to go to the researchers home, yes, or call them right, yeah, And not every journalist is actually going to do the work to go get primary resources, especially in this era of mass content creation, right, so usually what ends up happening is they just grab the information right out of the press release, rewrite it a little bit, and focus on that one

thesis statement. Right. What doesn't happen is they don't look at the literature review inside the actual paper that sets up the study, within the context of all the other

studies that are done on this topic. Right. Another problem is that within the world of journalism, especially on the Internet, but it was probably true on TV and stuff like that too, that there's very little incentive to accurately unicate the subtleties and the nuances of scientific results, put everything in context, communicate, you know, some caveats that that it might not be as clear cut as it first seemed from your headline, because what people want to click on

is something that says, I have the new answer for you. Milk is going to kill you. You will never believe this fact about milk, you know. And here's the other thing too, is that so we have that we have the the journalist, we have the scientists, but then of course we also have a consumer in and I can't help but think about what we know all the all that we've been talking about with false NT memories, and misattribution, as well as just the the idea that once a

particular narrative gets out there, take lose black pri instance. Now, I know it's a bit, so I don't I don't really mean to dissect a comedic bit too much. But in this example, like, did was he actually like reading a lot of literature about milk or is it just in the background of his mind he picks up on this narrative that milk is is good, and then it's ad. I think he's specifically talking about seeing headlines on either

nightly cable news or in a newspaper. So on one level, it's it's to what degree a certain bit of research makes a splash and the headlines, and then to what extent it's picked up on and and and sticks with the individual. Again, the low resolution of your memory is

contributing to this. I can't help but be reminded of the episode we did on Only Children and the psychology behind it, and the fact that you had one you know, decades and decades old though in like the late nineteenth century, Yeah, but basically over a century old, this horrible psychological methodology, Yeah,

making the case that that only children were monsters. And plenty of studies have come along, just one after the other, disproving that and showing that only children are not monster, they're not lonely, they're not you know, craven or spoiled, etcetera. But we keep sticking to this previously established narrative just because it made such a media splash and nothing after

that was able to achieve as much residence. And because it's easy to remember, You've got to think, like the access theory of memory, that things that are simple statements that are easy to remember are going to have much more purchase in your memory than things that are complicated and nuanced and hard to explain and have some conflicting results, and that you've got to put it in a lot of context. So yeah, that's one thing. Part of this

is an artifact of how science journalism gets done. Part of it is an artifact of our low resolution memories. But there's another thing that has to do with the science itself, which is that some subjects are as it stands today, more unstable than others regarding the scientific consensus. And if you read scientific literature critically, you can usually start to get a sense of which subject areas are producing more solid, dependable results in which ones are still

mired in some kind of legitimate controversy. Experimental design plays a big role in this. Nutrition is a classic example of an area that can be extremely difficult to properly control. Experiments like studies need to take place over a long period of time to see long term effects. They often rely on people to accurately report what they eat. You can kind of imagine what some problems with that might be um and add that to the fact that that there have been a lot of financial interest in the

production of certain results in nutrition science. So a lot of the stuff you might have heard in the history of science isn't necessarily being done by some independently funded university experiment, but it's done by some research group that's funded by the sugar industry, and what do you know, they find out that fats are bad for you and

sugar is good. We actually have a one of my favorite things that's ever been done at How Stuff Works, was created by one of our video producers, Paul Decan, and it is a in depth look at the sugar industry's influence on academic papers about the nutritional effects of sugar over the last like fifty years, so, so there are a lot of things to take into consideration. Some subject areas are just they're just swampy, or than others

they've got more problems. I mean, you'll notice that in I don't know, uh, you know, very like material science areas, there's just not going to be a lot of controversy about whether this new alloy is actually as strong as they say it is um, but there might be if there's somebody who's got a financial interest in it and they're publishing the you know, in studies that they've funded. Anyway,

I think it's an excellent question you ask Allison. It's something that we wrestle with all the time, and and the answer is difficult. There's no silver bullet on how to fix this. I think it has to do with helping people understand the complexities of science and understand the meta complexity of how other people come to believe in the ideas about scientific consensus and where they get their

impressions about what scientists say. Yeah, I mean, I guess like this is a difficult problem to solve of but I think like two steps that could be taken to help it, which probably, let's be honest, won't happen in the near future. Are that media organizations need to be more thorough in their research and their depiction of these studies.

But then also the consumers themselves need to have media literacy skills that they can rely on to understand these studies better, or to look at multiple sources and kind of triangulate what's actually going on here? All right, what it looks like Carney is coming at you, Christian with another piece of listener mail. What what's he got there

for you? Well, this one is great. This is actually a letter from a listener named Lindsay telling us about her personal alien abduction experience based on our two alien abduction episodes. Lindsay says, when I was growing up, about ten years old, I had a clubhouse outside of my house and would camp out and sleep inside of it on some summer nights. It was sturdy and constructed by hand, lofted on wooden posts acted as stilts, about eight feet

off the ground. One night, I climbed up the ladder with my sleeping bag, pulled up the ladder so nothing else could come up. I read some comic books and fell asleep. This is, by the way, like my ideal way to go to bed. Lindsay. The clubhouse had one side of double paned windows, one side that had a doorless doorway through which you could see my neighbor's yard, and the other two were solid wood walls. I slept

facing out the doorway. I woke up in the middle of the night one night and was frozen in fear because in my neighbor's yard I saw a saucer about the size of an average circular above ground pool, hovering over their yard, absolutely still about a hundred feet into the air. It was large and very cinematically stereotypical, a green glow metallic saucer, a beam coming down from the saucer, that sort of thing. I couldn't see anything inside of

it because it was oriented above me. I sat still, thinking that whatever was inside could possibly sense movement, and I felt like I was having trouble breathing. It was silent at first, and then I started to hear something that was difficult to describe. It was quiet, but in a way that felt loud and overwhelming. I could hear a ring in my ears, and I think it felt louder than it was because the world was quiet, but

the inside of my head, wasn't. I remember being terrified, but not that I was going to be hurt, just that I didn't know what was going to happen. I believe I forced myself to close my eyes, thinking that maybe the saucer couldn't move while I was looking at it, and I either fell asleep or I woke up again and it was gone. I didn't tell anybody because the whole situation felt fishy to me, and while I believe in aliens, I don't believe we've had any contact with them,

nor they with us. Years later, after keeping better track of my sleep habits and dreams, I learned about sleep paralysis and had experienced it a couple of other times throughout high school. When i'd wake up with it in my room, I could hear something that sounded like tribal percussion from the living room, though nobody you was in there, and I could see that the lights were not on. In these moments, it was the scariest that I couldn't move.

It felt the same way an arm does when you wake up in the middle of the night with your arm behind you and you need to use your other arm to pick it up and put it back to get the blood flowing again. The difference is that none of your body parts are able to move the other ones back into place or shake them out. Though I never again had visual hallucinations from sleep paralysis, only auditory sensations, I am thoroughly convinced that what I experienced with the

saucer in my neighbor's yard was indeed sleep paralysis. Being frozen in fear was probably physically being frozen and unable to move due to this. And it all went away when I went back to sleep and somehow broke the cycle.

H Well, that's interesting, and that does line up with a lot of what we talked about, uh, because what Luke just think of the elements, they're not only the sleep paralysis, but uh, the reading of the comic book before one goes to bed, potentially contributing to some of the like the narrative information you have on hand for the interpretation of of stimuli within that that murky period of waking and which certain hallucinations can occur, Right, Yeah,

I mean, I think what Lindsay experienced is what we described in those episodes as being sort of like the first stage of the alien abduction experience, right, you have sleep paralysis or some other kind of event that is difficult to explain, and then it sounds like lindsay didn't go on to the next phase, which was going to a therapist or a hypnotist and having false memories created that then somehow are extrapolated outward into something worse, right,

like actually being taken aboard the ship, right, or just any kind of like repeated self analysis of the memory that props up the supernatural explanation. Yeah, but again, this is a great example of like, we read lots of studies that were about sleep paralysis connected to the idea of alien abduction, but to have a firsthand account like

this is really nice. I think like the closest thing we had to that was we talked about that documentary That Nightmare, and how there are many people in that documentary who thought that their sleep paralysis events were alien abductions. You know, something I think might be interesting would be to sort of come up with standard narratives about how people get from having an experience like this to one

of two end points. You know, the path diverges, it forks off, and you can end up in the place where you say I think I had a strange experience and I would explain it through sleep paralysis or I don't know what happened or something like that, and then on the other hand, you have it was absolutely real and people won't believe me, Like, how do you get

what determines which path you follow? Well, I mean, I think there are a number of different factors there, but I mean one of them is just like, what do you need in your life? Do you? Is there a part of you that needs an experience great than yourselves that no one else is going to be able to understand or only a select inviting community is going to understand it. So you know, it's a desire for religious experience,

a desire to see God. This is why a number of abductees report that their experience, even though scary, is ultimately a positive experience for them because they come away from it feeling like, oh, I now know my place in the universe and that there's something above me that

could be taking care of me. It almost makes me wonder if this is parallel to what we're talking about with the science communication episode, where something that should be a question of you making judgments based on like facts and reading evidence and stuff like that is really more determined about your social environment. Yeah, absolutely, And I mean I think both of these things I meant to say

this when we were talking about science communication. They both come back to a fact that we hit over and over and over again on the show, which is just that like human beings as social animals, just are prone to making mistakes like this, you know, and how we interpret our events and and especially how we build culture around things that happened to us so that we can

explain the world around us. Alright, on that note, we're gonna take one more quick break, and when we come back, Carney will dish out the final trio of listener mail for us here today, Thank you, thank you. All Right, we're back. There's another piece of listener mail brought to us by Carney, and this one is from listener Allison. Allison writes in and says Mara Hart might be one of the coolest people out there, although that may be a bit biased, as I am also a fellow marine biologist,

a theologist to be exact. I love your podcast and listen every day while conducting my many hours of lab work. Among my favorite episodes are the ones where you had Mara Heart as a guest speaker, so I was beyond excited when I had the opportunity to meet Dr Hart this past week at the American Fisheries Society Symposium in the Bay, Florida, where she was one of the planary speakers.

I was able to find her after her talk and have a quick conversation with her one on one, where I asked her for her for some advice and commented on how much I love your podcast. Just like you guys. Dr Hart is an amazing communicator of science, breaking down the barriers of the ivory tower that is often scientific research and laying it out in a way that is interesting, engaging, and most importantly fun. It was really inspiring to listen to her speak, especially as a female scientist in the

early stages of my career as a researcher. Seeing how confident and engaging she was gave me some serious hashtag science goals. And I hope that I can quote unquote grow up to be just like her. Oh that's so cool. Yeah, I can't wait for your next episode. What a wonderful email. She's got one up on us. We've never met Mara in real life. We've only just been able to talk to Morrow on the phone before. But you're right, she is delightful. She is one of my favorite guests to

have on the show. What I love about having Mara on the show is that she's so down to earth about the science that she's involved in, but also how she this gets back to science communication, how she communicates it to the public, and how she she really expresses her wonder and awe over the things that she's studying.

You know. It's yeah, always fun to have her. So let's see what episodes the Osadas boneworm episode, she was on, the Coral Reef episode, and then we just recently had her on again for our our Shark reproduction episode earlier this summer. Alright, well, our next email comes in in reference to the episode that Robert and I did about the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages. This was a fun one, wasn't it, Robert? Oh? Yeah, this was This one was great because you had that wonderful

convergence of history, mythology, science, linguistics. It all came together. Yeah, And so we talked about the idea of or one of the things we discussed in the episode was the idea of the confusion of languages. In the biblical story of the Tower Babble, it's the confusion of tongues. You know, God gets threatened by the Tower project and says, I'm

going to make everybody speak different languages. But instead we talked about how languages actually diverge, and one of the things we talked about was the the possible idea of language barriers around the world being a kind of cultural immunity barrier that helps prevent harmful memes from spreading as quickly as they could if everybody in the world spoke

the same language, essentially like a like a firewall. Yeah, and so like if you've got a language, you've got some horrible meme, Like I think the obvious example would be Nazism. But you know things like that that catch on really quickly with a bunch of people and are very destructive, they do seem to be very rooted to the language system in which they emerged very often, and so they don't spread quite as easily across language barriers.

So this is why like I can't as cheeseburger isn't that big, and like I don't know Papua New Guinea that's exactly where we're going with this. Well, it's like I read the I didn't, but it's like I read the letter. So this is from Chris. Chris says, Hi, my name is Chris, and I was really fascinated by your Tower of Babel episode from last month. I love thinking about the great global flow of ideas and how languages play into the movement of philosophies and cultural norms.

There were two things from your episode that really stood out to me. The first was your brief acknowledgement that Japanese as a language has not drastically evolved over time. I studied Japanese for about six years and have traveled there twice for about a month each. I have a theory that Japanese has not evolved very drastically because they actually have two phonetic alphabets and a symbol based method of writing. Here a Ghana is their phonetic alphabet used

for vocabulary that originated in Japan. Kata Kana is their phonetic alphabet used for all foreign words or expressions that were introduced to Japanese culture. Because foreign concepts are isolated to a separate system of expression, the original Hiragana is very rarely forced to adapt or evolve. I guess it would maybe be more accurate to say that one of the Japanese alphabets is constantly adapting and taking in new words and concepts, while the core original method of writing

remains comparatively unchanged. I thought that was really interesting that. Yeah, that is a fascist It's true too. I studied Japanese in college, but yeah, I never thought of it that way before. It's kind of a way to enforce cultural tradition. Yeah. Uh. And it's certainly true that loan concepts and loan words from other languages is one of the main ways that languages seem to evolve in the modern day, or you know,

relatively modern day. I mean, you think about the way English came to it came to us as it is. You know, it's this crazy fusion of German and Old Norse and Spanish and all the Latin derived languages French, um, and the way those cultures came together. But so, yeah, really interesting. I love the how you brought up uh. I can I can has cheeseburger earlier, because I think humor is a key way to look at at how memes travel like not physical humor, because everybody can get

into the idea of like slapsticks. Slapstick tends to like if you're if you're trying to check out comedy from other cultures and cultures with a foreign language. Uh, the slapstick is going to be the easiest to understand or the outright like silly, goofy clowney behavior. But when it has a linguistic quality to it and you're having to deal with the barrier of translation, I think that's where

you a lot of the stuff ends up falling flat. Well, I think you'll be really interested to see where Chris goes next. So Chris says, the other thing I was really inspired by was the section towards the end in regards to snow Crash, and Chris says, I love that book. Um and the notion of a universal language actually being detrimental to global human consciousness as it would allow the

spread of potentially evil belief systems. I firmly believe that we are already witnessing the growth of a new global language. The kernel of this growth is modern meme culture. Memes as a language or a combination of non technical English and images or symbols, images are universally understood and very simplistic. English is as close as you can get to a global language at this moment. When you combine the two, you end up with a type of messaging that can

be understood and recreated on a global scale. Combined with the preferred method of distributing memes the Internet and social media, you have a way to very cheaply communicate ideas on a global scale with rapid fire quickness, and not have those ideas particularly hampered by translation. A scary part of this is that memes allowed for the global spread of anti democratic political ideals. It's a fact, a fact that we witnessed in Brexit, in the U s presidential election

and the French election. We witness non English and non French speaking actors communicating anti democratic ideas to English and French speaking American, British, and French said. Since Russia has been known to weaponize thought viruses as a comic wo nerd, I'm excited to write that phrase and spread them through memes and massive disinformation dumps. What really irks me is that it's a one way flow because countries like Russia and China maintain such stringent censorship laws and control over

the Internet. They can keep their population somewhat inoculated from pro democratic ideas that could potentially flow from us to them in meme form. Meanwhile, we hold freedom of speech as a core value of ours, so that we lack the kind of isolation inoculation that would prevent Russian anti democratic memes from infecting us. And that's pretty much what I've got. Sorry, it's so long. Thanks for reading. I'd love to hear back. Keep up the great work on

the podcast. Thanks again, Chris. I have so many things I want to talk about related to this. I think, Yeah, I think this is a really and this is something we've actually talked about a fair bit off off, Mike. Is the idea of the ways new forms of communication allow ideas to spread over the Internet so much more easily,

but I've never put it in words like this. I think Chris has got a really interesting idea about the role memes play and you can absolutely see it for yourself if you watch say, disinformation bots operating on Twitter. They love memes, right, Yeah, So to his point about this being very comic, Bookie, there is a classic issue

of of a book called Global frequency. The uh warren Ellis who I end up referencing on the show all the time, wrote and it was drawn by the late Steve Dylan, and the premise was that a signal was intercepted by set and translated and then subsequently broadcast as a mimetic information to the entire world. Because it was in meme format, it starts infecting people. Uh, it's designed it's to infect people essentially, so that like memes are the best carrier for this virus, right, So that is

a really interesting concept on a sci fi level. But then also I think it's interesting to step back and remember like the difference between the term meme that we used to describe JPEG's with the fun impact on them on the Internet versus what like people like Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore had in mind when we first came up with the terminology. So maybe we should do a memetics episode. I mean, we've definitely touched on the medics and lots of episodes in the past, but maybe we

could devote something to the core idea. I mean, the basic concept scept of a meme originally is just the idea of a self reproducing bit of cultural information. So it could be a song, it could be a political belief, it could be anything that tends to make copies of itself in the minds of people who share some kind of language or cult cultural Well, I guess between anybody really um in the same way that genes make copies

of themselves in the gene pool, right. Yeah, and then again, it's funny there's a theme for this listener meal that seems to be coming around. Or maybe it's just I'm obsessed with this topic again, it seems to me media literacy is super important here, right, and that like what you see if you're if you see some of these memes that are designed specifically as a persuasive tools right there,

like rhetorical weapons almost that go out there, right. Uh, if you don't stop and try to judge them based on their merit, how they were created, who they were designed for, etcetera, then you're more likely to be susceptible to them and subsequently fooled by them, which brings us to the emoji movie right exactly hit of the summer. You know, when we talk about issues like this, uh that the you know, they involve global politics, interaction between

governments around the world. One thing that I helped that I think helps in how we we use language carefully in describing problems like this is to correctly identify the culprits. So when we talk about something like this, I think it is undeniably true. There have been, you know, enough report there's really no question that the Russian government does operate tons of disinformation campaigns on the Internet and stuff

like that. But I like to think of those as Crimlin disinformation product products, not Russian disinformation products, such that you don't identify them with the Russian people's being responsible for the same thing is accusing us of some similar kind of disinformation mation campaign or hacking campaign that our government might be up to behind the scenes. Right, yeah, exactly. Alright, it looks like we have one more bit of listener mail. When last scrap here from Carney looks like it's for

you to read here, Christian. Yeah, this last one comes to us from Duncan. And I kind of struggled with whether or not I for we got it about a week and a half ago, and I was like, I don't know how to respond to this. And so the fact that we were doing a listener mail episode seems like a great place for us to address it because

it's a complicated topic. He touches on two episodes that we've covered, the first being Wicked Problems episode that Robert and I did about a year ago maybe, and then Cleo Dynamics, which we covered in the last two weeks now. Duncan says, Hi, guys, in two separate podcasts, you have referred to poverty and social inequality as wicked problems, and I feel that this is not only inaccurate, but also dangerous.

It is hard to act from a place of pessimism and feeling that these problems are too complicated, and that makes most people throw up their hands and go what is the point in trying definitions? One of the features of wicked problems is the difficulty of defining them. Poverty has a fairly clear, those scalar definition, although different people will draw the line at different points on the scale,

the measurable features of poverty are fairly clearly defined. Similarly, defining the success of a solution is simply a measure of whether people move up the scale in a meaningful way. Obviously, there are some complexities in ways to subdivide the concepts, but in general definition is not a problem solutions. Here again, a primary feature of wicked problems falls down. There are solutions to the majority of poverty situations, not a magic bullet for all of them, but a portfolio of policy

measures that can have drastic effects if used together. In the repeating history episode, this is the Cleo dynamics one. You quoted Cleo dynamics historians who said that reducing inequality is critical. These historians would, I am sure, be able to provide a series of policies that would achieve this based on fairly reliable historical data. Most economists that favor

reducing inequality should be able to if asked. Most importantly, most of these solutions do not have major cyclical or intermeshed knock on effects, which make them impossible to implement. In most cases, well thought out equality policy improves a lot of nearby issues like crime and drug addiction, but rarely do they result in any major detrimental eye effects. So uh, he says. Finally, in fact, poverty and inequality are among the most well behaved, predictable social problems we have.

He gives a number of examples here for US that are their weblinks, So I'm not going to read you U r L s over our listener mail episode. Then he he ends by saying, I am not an expert, but I am sure there are hundreds of clever ideas for improving social equality among those that are. The reason we are not working to solve poverty is a lack of political will to do so, not because the problem

is inherently difficult to solve. In my opinion, the reason there is a lack of political will is because inequality is a driving force of our current financial and political systems and the mechanism by which those who have power hold onto it. Why would the ruling class want to change it? Please give people hope. Regards Duncan, well, you know,

I think he makes some good points here. Um I do want to agree that first of all, that that I think pessimism uh is an area of inactivity, and it is difficult to act from a place of pessimism. We have to act as optimists uh and uh on. I would also like to return to the topic at some point in the future and and do an episode on the idea of a post scarcity world, like what what are what are some of the possible road maps to a post scarcity world, What would it look like?

What are the you know, what are the ideals that are wrapped up there? And how long have we've been we've been uh dreaming of it and trying to figure

out how to get there. Um. In terms of Wicked Problems, I know that when we did that episode, and it's been a little while, we weren't so much trying to get people to focus on objectives like this, but it was more like, Okay, when someone comes at you, particularly the politician comes to you, and they have a solution to a complex problem in society, Uh, question what they are saying. Question the validity of this so called solution

comes down to critical thinking. Again. Yeah, I actually pulled some of our notes from that Wicked Problems episode so that I could reference them back. And I thought it was interesting actually because when you turn back and you look at the guys who phrased this riddle and Weber, they really dove into this in the nineteen seventy three paper Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. They specifically used poverty as an example. Uh, and they said, uh, poverty,

it's like tugging a loose string on a garment. What causes poverty? What is it? If it's merely low income, then that alone explodes out into concerns of both national and regional issues. But what about the economic aspects, the health and psychological aspects, and the cultural issues. Right, So, in regards to what Duncan was just saying to us, yeah,

I think it's easy. Like if you look at it on a scalar level, especially like an economic one, you can say, oh, yeah, this is a very easily solvable problem. But Duncan himself at the end talks about how the real difficulty that makes it inherently difficult to solve is political will inequality and how that leads to our political systems and our financial systems, right, and ultimately the the ideas that those who have the power to change it aren't willing to do so. Right, That is the wicked

problem nature of poverty in my mind. I mean, one obvious response that occurs to me is that saying a problem is difficult to eradicate with a simple solution is

very different than saying a problem cannot be improved upon. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think wicked problems are more how do how do we put this, Like, are something that you should be on the lookout for in terms of the rhetoric that is being pushed your way, right, in terms of how easy and or difficult something is to solve, for instance, right now, and I think this debate is only become even stronger since we recorded that wicked episode, Wicked problems episode.

But healthcare, how many people in the last year, how many politicians in the last year said, oh, healthcare so easy to solve, right, Uh, We've got a perfect plan, This is so easy to solve. Then you see in action how difficult it actually is. Right, Like, if someone makes the argument, this would be easy to solve, but politics, you're missing the point, Like politics and the political system. That's part of addressing the problem, That the problem is

wrapped around there, that's where the thread is tangled. Like it would be so easy to lose weight if not for my willpower. Yeah, exactly, exactly, Yeah. Now I want to go back to the notes here for just one last bit here on wicked problems. Wicked problems can't be solved, they can only be mitigated, right Uh. And one proposal for this is strategic design using empathy and favoring abductive

reasoning and rapid prototyping. So essentially the idea here for abductive reasoning is that the premise doesn't guarantee a solution. Rather that is uh, that's deductive or logic reasoning. So this is essentially inferring the best, most simple solution. Yeah, abductive the search for the best explanation. So I appreciate Duncan your letter because it really did make me think for a good long week about like how do we

respond to this? But at the end of the day, I do think that poverty can be defined as a wicked problem. I don't disagree with you though, that we need to give people hope and we do need to think from an optimistic place, and I don't see defining things as a wicked problem is necessarily pessimistic. No, I mean another side of that coin is you don't want to discourage people, but you also want to help give

people reasonable expectations. Um Like, if you promise somebody the moon and then you can't quite deliver it, they're going to get disillusioned with whatever mechanism or system tried to deliver them the moon and failed. Instead, if you. If you promise people reasonably attainable goals and you do attain those, that actually has a positive knock on effect that gives people confidence in the the ability of or system of

problem solving to succeed again in the future. Anyways, if you have more information that you want to relate to us, either about Wicked Problems, Cleo dynamics, poverty, or any of the other topics that we talked about here today, you can send them to Carney the Robot. How do they get in touch with Carney the Robot? Oh, well, you know, there are a number of different ways to go about that. You can head on over to our various social media accounts.

So we're on Facebook. That's where you'll find the Discussion Module group if you want to join that and interact with other listeners as well as as us. UH. You can also find us on Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, The mothership is Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Yeah, that's

where you'll find everything you need to know. That's where all the podcast episodes are, as well as links out to those other accounts, And if you want to get in touch with us directly, as always, you can email us at Blow the mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it How stuff works dot Com