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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Ellie and I'm joined by Emma and Antonia to talk about debunking myth and finding new facts ooh a very exciting episode this week Antonia this was your idea how did you come up with this I was watching a YouTuber called mooncat she did a 3our long video about debunking evolutionary psychology oh it was really interesting
did you learn anything uh especially from three hours of a YouTube video yeah I learned quite a lot of stuff some rather concerning things like these academics rack up loads of citations because they just refer to each other and when you dig in deeper sometimes it's not a very robust study like it's got very small sample size or the findings that they got from it came from a flawed idea or they're applying anecdotal things to it which means that people not reading the study would maybe
get a bad headline from it I see Emma you're in the academic research world what do you reckon about this I think it's an interesting point because I think a lot of the times in Academia you actually don't really know what's happening behind the scenes um and it definitely is like a huge challenge when like you first get into trying to find trustworthy papers and how like what is a trustworthy paper because you obviously have like really high impact journals like nature or
science but you know there's really good science and really good research in other journals as well um especially stuff that is probably more relevant to your field so how do you know if you're just reading in these journals that they're actually kind of trustworthy because personally definitely always Google like you know almost the answer I'm looking for um and then like a paper comes up and it's got some experimental results the back it and I'm like this is
great but I think it really like took me a while to learn I actually need to maybe think a bit more critically and actually think of maybe things that might not be so good about what they're doing and I think a really good thing to tell in Academia actually is especially if you're looking at experiments like how much did they go into the methods because I think some people are quite secretive about it but I think that's not really in like I don't know like the
little like friendship of science that we have like no one can steal it cuz you published it but like let's just you know make it easier for people to do it because that's also supporting your work so I think I think actually I've got a bit better just from Reading like the style of the the writer to see like is this actually something that is critical of its own work then that's good because you can kind of like see that they're being a bit more honest um but I do
think it's a really absolutely yeah interesting point actually about how you know what to trust and what not to trust yeah it's really interesting how did we end up here then in this place with things that like need to be debunked how did we get to a world where we're not sure what we can and can't trust one of the things moonat found about papers yeah was about methodology and some of the evolutionary psychology studies were from say the 80s and they weren't
repeatable so there was a big push for repeating old studies to see did it confirm and find the same results and actually sometimes they didn't and it was partly because of the analysis that they did so they could get some data and almost because they were looking for a certain result they found it in the in the data and sometimes it's not because malicious they thinking oh this must be the right answer but they're thinking oh maybe that data is a bit of an outlier
that you know there's some underlying noise so I need to correct for it and then eventually you've kind of almost tied it up in a nice neat conclusion yeah I think it's very easy to do that that idea of like confirmation bias of like expecting to find a result and then even subconsciously making it the result that you find is quite interesting I think also another thing is that we learn more right as we evolve a society like people believed the Earth was flat
because we didn't have planes and hot air balloons and satellites in the sky sending us pictures of around Earth and therefore we know we kept learning so it's easy to see why we would believe one thing and then learn more and change uh into thinking something else yeah definitely like you have a theory and you test it with experiments and sometimes the experiment might have been flawed like Emma said the methodology or maybe the technology wasn't available to
analyze that data in such detail that you could find what you were looking for sort of like the large hron collider needed to be that big to be able to get those results it wasn't working on smaller scale what are they called collide particle accelerators yes I'm talking about a field I don't [Laughter] know um but in general right yeah you you learn more as you as you go on but you then have to kind of build on exist knowledge or revise it rather than saying that's it we found it yeah it's
important not to stop do you think there's a case for too much information Emma I really I really really do I think um especially when like you're looking into something Niche uh or even just like actually something like social you might read a news article that's written by you know different people and get different views on it and you're like this is actually like there so I have so much information about an event that happened that I actually can't piece it
together in my head um and I find the same thing with like science especially and like if you like find an experiment that proves one thing and you're like okay that makes sense I've internalized that in my head I understand that understand that completely and then you read something else and it's a different experiment but it's basically disproved that and you're like well you're not comparing the same thing but you've shown different things and I believe
both things so what's actually happening is there something that like else we need to do to find out or is one of them wrong or are both of them wrong because they don't agree with each other because I feel like what you always want is like someone to have the same thing as you but I think that so rarely happen happens um and there's so much information out there I think like um I don't know I think like there's like a stat somewhere I don't know but it's like the amount of like Google
results that have been like returned for each search just like keeps on increasing um with time because they just way more information that keeps on and you're like I don't know and I guess there is also like the argument especially with things like Google is if like people pay to have their links earlier up then oh that's true you're going to click on that and that's going to have some form of bias as well but like of course you're going to click on one of the first Pages because I'm not
scrolling to like page 160 just to find an answer um I can't remember the last time I went to the second page of Google so true so how do we prioritize then if we've got all this information some of it agrees some of it doesn't some of it's solid research some of it might be a bit more sketchy how how do we know what to do next oh I I think I think that's really difficult but if I take an example from from my field you kind of choose what matters to you most is it
something happening quickly or is it happening at a low cost especially when there's something with no absolute right solution so climate change so many factors go into it this is why we can't just say we should absolutely just cover the whole entire planet with solar panels can't just do that because that takes too much resource we or we don't have Farmland you know whatever you have to kind of take different criteria into consideration you know multi criteria decision analysis maybe that's the
problem is when you have an abundance of information you then have to apply some other level of thinking do you think that's very similar I just when you said the climate crisis and like something like kind of clicked where like when you have loads of things to do and you're like I just can't do a single thing oh yes and like are we having like a less efficient action to The Climate crisis because I don't know people in power are even just like smaller people just are
like I don't know what to do should I I don't know recycle everything into millions of different things or should I just you know walk to work or what else should I do that can help so I feel like it's like a maybe if there was a study that was like the biggest difference that's going to be made is by this and then everyone will be like okay we're all going to make a plan to do that oh but that everyone's the same I think that's that's the biggest challenge is that if if you said here is your
prescribed routine to lower your impact it's not going to work for everyone you know there will be limitations to the study and everyone has the kind of figure it out and I think that's maybe one of the challenges is yeah every study has a limitation but sometimes maybe bad scientists don't recognize limitations or they say everything is for future the area of further research will be the uh yeah the climate change example is really interesting because it's like
it's like you said that people don't always agree necessarily even if the research backs it up so things like wind turbines are like generally agreed to be quite a good source of renewable energy but then people love to hate them right like they're noisy they're eyes sours people love to bang on about the fact that they're bad for birds which might necessarily be true for some people but it's not necessarily true for every wind turbine in the you know entire country
so like how do these ideas that are not necessarily wrong but also not necessarily right still like persist and are there more examples of stuff like that well literally one of the things I was thinking was we're not so worried about birds or bats with winter mines anymore and that's because research has found that the amount of birds killed by wi turbines are multitude less than household cats yeah so it's one of those where it's almost like a zero some game
well we could have winds herbines if we have no cats or something you know but people aren't going to get rid of stop having cats yeah and there's already loads of cat yeah I think um another example of kind of not necessarily misinformation but like just how some people are kind of reluctant to learn about new things and accept that into their kind of idea and their head is the dinosaurs literally have feathers that's been a thing for like 10 years now when that first came out and
there's still more stuff that keeps on coming out like recently like where there's like yet again like some like feather like encased in Amber resin and people are like I think still hearing about it for the first time but then you know if you ask like a kid or you even ask in know your average person to draw a dinosaur they won't draw feathers and even like the new Jurassic World films that are coming out now the dinosaurs do not have feathers so I think I mean
that's I guess Hollywood but like I think people just like it doesn't really make a difference to them if the dinosaurs have feathers or not so they might as well just like have this own little idea and stick with what they kind of believe to in themselves so I think sometimes it's just a reluctance to change yeah I was just thinking that cuz I write about dinosaurs on a semi-regular basis and I like see Recent research and then still if you ask me to draw a dinosaur right now I wouldn't
draw a feather D I'm my own product of all these sort of theories I think it gets it takes like a long time like if you have a long-standing idea to go from the research to public opinion to a generally held belief by the world is going to take a long time for like that shift to happen yeah I think when I was looking at research for this is like how long does it take for an idea to get replaced by new research and if we think about sort of the medical field where
people want to get the best treatment even when something is discovered and found to be a good or better way of treating someone it might take eight years for that to actually start being delivered and that's in a in a very practical way and a very it's very urgent you know you want you want that to happen quickly as opposed people not drawing dinosaurs with feathers is not going to fundamentally harm us on a very urgent level yeah I think that's true but it's also like
it's the same things we were saying before isn't it it's like cost and priority like yes we want the best treatment for the best cures of different diseases but that process takes a long time in the first place yeah so then getting it into sort of General use is very very difficult what about things in a more modern world how can we trust things online that we see nowadays o I think it's really hard nowadays honestly I think especially I feel like I sound like I don't know my
parents in a way even though I know lad of people who work with AI but I think it is actually a little bit scary like because there's loads of I mean even just on a recent us election there was so much like genuinely fake videos of people saying support for Trump or support for whoever like for example tayor Swift had to come out and then actually publicly say this is fake this isn't me this isn't what I think but like that video would have been shared to people and have power in itself and
so it's something that the more reliable they get and the more people just kind of see something don't really check it and scroll past but then taking from it the message is quite scary because it's getting really good so I didn't see this so was this a video generated using AI of Taylor Swift promoting or saying she supports Donald Trump for US president election yeah I think it was even just a a voice over of her voice oh wow okay but it was like because she's you know
been on a million talk shows I mean I know they don't really need like an actual sample of the voice to do it but like there's just so much data on her that's around and especially like celebrities themselves there's so many pictures of them like at every single angle so if you just like train a data set just on Taylor Swift You will get a really good output if you're like I want to see tayor Swift wearing like a red cowboy hat you know and it starts to get pretty dangerous deep fake videos so
like completely like generated videos um that like have people's faces like moving in them have actually gotten like really believable which is pretty scary because there could be like a video of you saying something and doing something that you really just have never done ever and then all of a sudden that's on the internet and then it's we still have the problem that it's on the internet now it won't be taken off yeah that's what my mom always used to say to me
anything you put on the Internet is going to live there forever I don't think anyone cares enough about my opinions to twist my words into a uh political campaign however how do we know because you said that you know you heard Taylor Swift's voice on a video on the internet and then she came out and said that wasn't her that's not what she think but how do you know to then trust that that it is her saying I don't support Donald Trump I mean we know it was Taylor Swift when she said it
because it was her social media account I mean actually I say that someone could have hacked account but yeah we have to kind of use these things with passwords verification to prove it was them who said it you know you can't scan or print money because there are little dots that oh I know what you mean like some inbuilt technology that means you can't just make your own money laundering scheme yeah so you can't print your own money I wonder if that's something that
we could do with AI generated content so people know if wasn't a real video yeah maybe that's a future application do you think there's like anything we can do in the moment like how do we how do we trust this stuff because a lot of Facebook is like an echo chamber or like verified accounts on social media what you follow if you're let's use the political example because that's easier if you're left leaning typically you'll get left leaning content right the algorithm
feeds things to you that it knows you're going to like so then it becomes its own Echo chamber I suppose online Twitter has um like a misinformation feature but can we even trust that like who's making the decision to label content misinformation or you know not accurate I don't know if that yeah requires oversight over a private company if they're making this information so available yeah if it can reach a can reach a lot of people do we have have almost a social obligation for
them to have good good intentions do you think it pressures people to come out more to like say what they really think or have stronger opinions maybe but not in like a way that I think is necessarily productive because people feel like they have to say something so that there isn't something that comes out that I don't know is claiming that they said something else so they have to kind of like put themselves out there where I think like is that really helping things a lot of the time I think
sometimes there always a bit too many opinions on the internet so I think maybe there needs to be less or if it's like a bit rushed yeah they didn't have all the information but they've just kind of Gone with the headlines yeah this comes back to what we were saying before isn't it like things are missed in Translation even between groups or you know if you're rushing to combat something that's been written about you maybe you haven't taken the time to fully understand all the implications of
what has been said or what you're going to say in response which then I guess just feeds into the whole content machine that is social media so there's this Research Center called the center for an informed public they find information that comes out and they frame it as rumors and they try and fact check those rumors and prepare sort journalists or other research groups and this was in particular for the US presidential election okay so their like mission is to combat misinformation then
yeah so when they find a new thing pop up they will then try and get sort of where did this come from how did it start and where is the truth in it or why people might have said it and what they might gain out of it yeah that's the other thing as well Emma you probably see this a lot with like papers sometimes a paper saying the benefits of drinking red wine is sponsored by Australian red wine for everyone.com like stuff like that do you know what I mean like the pinch of salt idea yeah
yeah I mean example was obviously obvious but I feel like sometimes people could be like just care if it's just like a a company that's like reputable as well and be like oh like this is a good company that's saying that so that's nice even if it probably does benefit the company as well yes but not to like uh Circle back to the Twitter like flag there is yeah definitely the argument of who decides the flag but I think like if you're scrolling and you see that there is a flag you can still
read the Tweet but I think mentally you just take a little note that's like maybe this isn't exact whereas I think like Facebook though you don't even have anything that's an indicator and so it's super easy to just believe everything you see so I think even if like the indicator is not saying you know you can't really trust that it just is a little bit of a mental check for you to go oh actually this isn't you know perfect facts so I think it's still a good idea actually and um maybe yeah
some like social media company should take a little bit more responsibility because it affects them as it affects like loads of other people absolutely and there's then the thing that it could go like too far like when does misinformation just become completely false or something like um liable where you can be sued over what you've said because it has actually no basis or you're like defaming someone's character you know those things anyone at the moment can write anything to a point but
if you're a journalist or you're publishing something that says one thing that's not true then you know you do open yourself up to Legal Ram ification from the K-pop World some entertainment companies have actually started suing people that spread rumors I don't know if they're always necessarily fighting against false information or just fighting against information being spread about the people in their company that they don't want people to spread such as if pictures of someone was
smoking and that's a big taboo then they might have legal action against the people who posted the picture pictures and then spread them oh that's interesting because presumably those pictures are real of that person smoking yes it might don't want that image portrayed to their fans or whoever yeah but then yeah it's like we saying weren't it that it then leads to censorship and sort of if you can't say this and you can't say that then I'll get that taken down but then I guess
that's the publicity thing from their end or the band's management or whoever yeah very interesting I really like the Snopes fact checks they often come up with like quite wacky ones of like oh can a wombat run faster than us same bolt or like crazy things that like perpetuate on the internet like silly things like that but then they do you know do a deep dive and look at the research and speak to experts and find out if it's actually accurate but then I guess it's like everything you have to
take it with a certain amount of cynicism I suppose can we combat these things can we do anything to ourselves is there courses we could do or you know can we arm ourselves against all this misinformation that's out there in the world I mean we especially having academic backgrounds potentially have more of an idea than most about where research is coming from perhaps I think the main like I guess thing to combat it is just to take your time when reading things because there's just so much like
media out there I think it's really easy to get lost in it and I think I think you mentioned a course I think that would be like even just like in a school like just like how you can find a website that you can trust or um anything like that would be really useful because I think I think I'm definitely maybe being agist towards my mom here but like I feel like she reads Facebook as like you know very very true and I don't think her Facebook is plagued by a lot of misinformation but
um you know I think like when we was first like getting to know the internet I think even our teachers would say a couple things that was like you know just be careful what you read it's not always right anyone can write on it whereas I feel like my mom like she didn't really have that when she was growing up because there was no internet yeah so I think like with the growing times I think you know AI is a conversation probably you know probably definitely in schools right now in terms
of like um not like cheating but like help on things and like you know um so I think putting it into the curriculum naturally because people are going to be using it anyway is a really good way to get people to kind of educate themselves about it rather than just use and abuse it I'd like a course I think on uh debunking things I think also there's there are websites that you can trust to a certain extent right like things like news articles from the guardian or the
BBC yes they're not 100% free of bias because nothing ever can be but in general they are held to a higher standard and are definitely at least trying quite hard to operate within the boundaries of the law and like journalistic rules so on the topic of is there a course well there are some psychology papers not evolutionary psychology papers but psychology papers we know those are all rubbish now did sort of look into some of the ideas so could we inoculate
people that was the word that they used by giving them small doses of misinformation to learn from the process I think they set up um a game as well for that so this was a researcher called Sander van lien Lindon who has done some work on inoculation the other paper that I was reading said okay it might be our to inoculate people so we just kind of have to give them maybe a warning that you might be being misled yeah I suppose that's what Emma was saying wasn't it
about having something on social media that just says this might not be true yeah at least triggers you a little bit to be a bit more skeptical about even things that don't necessarily have that warning on and then yeah I guess going to the original Source maybe is the best idea if you can find it yeah that's that's the um that's the other challenge isn't it if it's not behind a pay wall so true but that inoculation uh was reminding me of like a misinformation
vaccine small dose and you have to try and think of a way to not learn it I mean has anything got more in misinformation surrounding it than vaccines and that whole kettle of fish oh I wonder I wonder if someone's done the statistics about what's the most um misinformed topic yeah what do people have the most I guess wrong or like slightly off opinions about something to speculate on something else that kind of leads people down the wrong path such as conspiracy theories is that kind of Gap of
knowledge but also they're trying to fill that Gap so much that they almost close themselves off from any new information that contradicts it so almost having to keep an open mind about new information and actually process it not just writing it off just because it disagrees with what you already know some people can get defensive right if you've always believed one thing and then suddenly new information comes to light that says maybe that wasn't quite right instead of thinking oh that's
interesting people think you're attacking my belief system you're attacking something that I've known to be true for a long time and then that can lead to a lot of fear sometimes or worry about what's being you know shared classic example is was it capus who first came up with the model of the sun doesn't rotate around the earth but the Earth rotates around the Sun and he faced religious persecution for such an idea we are not the center of the universe after all yes
heliocentric theory well I guess that's the thing isn't it it could just be one person that comes up with a a new idea that happens to be right we see that all the time in science that what we thought was true isn't necessarily the whole picture and then we learn more and you know grow and build on that knowledge and keep learning I think is the important thing well that feels like a good place to leave it I think we've covered just about everything that I could think of in regards to this
there's conspiracy theories there's t Swift there's how do we spot bad headlines modern examples examples from Academia and even examples from the here and now if you're interested in any of these things links will be in the show notes as always and in the episode description and we'll see you next time for another episode thank you for listening the views expressed in this podcast belong intirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed
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