Episode 116: Pain, Pleasure, and Peer-Reviewed Penises

David and Tamler break down the latest small-stakes academic controversy--yes the one about conceptual penises. Does the recent "Sokal-like" hoax expose the ideological extremism of gender studies? Or does it show that certain portions of the "skeptic" community are susceptible to the same biases as their opponents? In the main segment they discuss the problems with measuring pain, pleasure, and happiness. When your doctor asks you to rate your pain between 1 and 10 and you say a 7, does your '7' reflect the same subjective experience as another person's '7'? (That depends--have you experienced childbirth?) How can we get more accurate readings of pain and pleasure across different people with different experiences? Most importantly, which number gets you the Vicodin?

Support Very Bad Wizards

Links:

• Skeptic » Reading Room » The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies
• Sokal affair - Wikipedia
• Why the "Conceptual Penis" Hoax is Just a Big Cock Up. - Bleeding Heart Libertarians
• The engine of irrationality inside the rationalists – Ketan Joshi
• An embarrassing moment for the skeptical movement – Footnotes to Plato
• Bartoshuk, L. (2014). The measurement of pleasure and pain. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9, 91-93.
• Krueger, A. B., & Stone, A. A. (2014). Progress in measuring subjective well-being. Science, 346(6205), 42-43.