SIO295: Patreon QnA 2!

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to the Patreon Q&A. Two. We got to two, Lindsey. Congrats. How are you doing?

0:00:34 Lindsey: We did. Awesome. How are you?

0:00:36 Thomas: Two in a row is more than a lot of things that I do, you know? I do a lot of, like, one and done. Like, that wasn't a good idea, or it was but didn't turn out the way I wanted, so I'm like, eh. But two means, you, know, that means something.

0:00:40 Lindsey: Yep.

0:00:49 Lindsey: Mm-hmm. Two dots make a line. I've heard that.

0:00:52 Thomas: Yeah. Although we haven't finished yet, so maybe we... I can't count it as two until we finish. Finish

0:00:58 Lindsey: Actually, that's true because I've got a bombshell for one of the early questions. It's, uh, yeah, this might be the end of the Q&A.

0:01:00 Thomas: Oh. Yeah. So, Thanks so much to the patrons for asking questions on the, uh, it's gonna be May post, are there any other month jokes with boy bands from the 90s that we can do, or I think it's just, it's going to be May.

0:01:17 Lindsey: Yeah, I can't think of any. Yeah. Yeah, so I don't get that joke either. I get the it's gonna be May part, but so what is the ramen thing?

0:01:22 Thomas: What's the ramen thing? It's just a joke about, what's his name's hair? Just, you now, I can't remember his name, you Now, Justin Timberlake or whatever, because that picture was always like that bleached curly hair that he had. And it would start out as it's going to because the song is it's going to be me, but he sings it like it's got to be my, you know. And so people started posting that as it is going to be May and it would just be his face. And then the Internet being the Internet, they would just post Top Ramen. And then, you knows, like seeing how far into levels of abstraction you can get and have people still recognize the meme. That's a lot of what the Internet is these days.

0:01:24 Lindsey: Oh, okay. Yeah. Right. Yep.

0:01:57 Lindsey: Gotcha. It's true.

0:01:59 Thomas: Yeah. So.

0:01:59 Lindsey: I like that.

0:02:00 Thomas: Anyway, let's.

0:02:03 Lindsey: There were a couple of questions that came up in the last Q&A about the effectiveness of tasers. And it seems like I might have answered that question a little bit too hastily. So I, you know, I read a few studies that were analyses of police reports, and it seemed from those as though, you couple of days after we recorded the last Q&A, I heard a Behind the Bastards episode that touched on the fact that a lot of that research seems to be compromised. So apparently the manufacturer was funding a lot the early research that was done on the safety and effectiveness of tasers.

0:02:38 Thomas: 10.

0:02:39 Lindsey: And there was at least one published article on their effectiveness where the author had been paid paid like $10,000 or $20,000 by the company.

0:02:48 Thomas: Tasers. Oh, no, dollars. Yeah, okay, we'll. Give you a hundred free tasers if you.

0:02:51 Lindsey: Yeah. It would take a lot of tasers, I think, to compromise my research integrity. But

0:02:58 Thomas: A press conference. He's got like 20 of them strapped to his body. All right, I did some research, research on tasers.

0:03:05 Lindsey: So one of the researchers was paid and yet they declared like no conflicts of interest. And they usually have to give a statement about that. So anyway, so the studies that I read were not among those where the researchers have been paid. But another thing that Evans was suggesting in his reporting was that there has been deliberate suppression of taser-related deaths. And if that's the case, then doing an analysis of police reports probably wouldn't be the most reliable way to figure out... Yeah. So

0:03:30 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Again, if there was a study on knees on necks, you and we just took the police's word for it, George Floyd died of just, you know, heart related illness. And we wouldn't know that because they honestly, like, I know we've mentioned it before, but the the little press release or whatever it was they did initially before the video came out for George Floyd was like, "Oh, man had a slight medical thing," like that. And think about all the times we don't get get to the bottom of that, and all of that is in the is police data.

0:04:02 Lindsey: Exactly.

0:04:02 Thomas: Like that, that is what goes into that. So, okay, that makes sense that maybe there. Would be stuff there we're not seeing. Oh.

0:04:06 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so I went back and did a little bit more reading, and I found a study that wasn't based on police reports. So it's kind of a correlational design. So they just looked at rates of in-custody sudden deaths during the five years before and the five years after the adoption of tasers in California. And they found that sudden deaths in custody increased by like sixfold after taser use was initiated. So.

0:04:34 Thomas: Wow.

0:04:34 Lindsey: That is strongly suggestive of what Evans is claiming there. So

0:04:35 Thomas: So. That suggests that like people are going, you know, "Oh, it's a heart attack" kind of thing, and it's. Getting coded that way. Oh, man.

0:04:43 Lindsey: Yes. Actually, people should go and listen to this pair of episodes because the, more broadly, the episodes are on something called excited delirium, which is essentially a probably made up syndrome that's used to justify excessive use of force. So there's all kinds of deaths that are attributed to this, and it's not, it's probably not a real thing.

0:04:45 Thomas: Yeah. Sure. Yeah. It's, that's depressing. Anyway, I. think my tranquilizer dart policy still works, still applies.

0:05:02 Lindsey: Yeah, totally agree.

0:05:08 Thomas: Again, the tiger gets out of the zoo. I don't know. Maybe they still also shoot them. But I feel like in every movie, it's a tranquilizer gun. Go with that. Worst case scenario, someone unintended gets a nice nap. You know? I mean, obviously, there will still be like, oh, this person had a heart attack because of drugs or something. But like, it has got to be less than electric shocks, don't you think?

0:05:19 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. No. I. love it. I. I. do, yeah.

0:05:33 Thomas: You. Get. The dosage.

0:05:34 Lindsey: I'm. Not not.

0:05:34 Thomas: Right.

0:05:34 Lindsey: An. Expert, but.

0:05:35 Thomas: Well. Okay. Is that all the taser talk?

0:05:35 Lindsey: Yep. That's all the taser. Talk.

0:05:39 Thomas: Okay. Windy City Roger, uh, best. Friend of the show, asks in honor of the title thread, uh, Team NSYNC or Backstreet Boys. And this is great because Roger knows me so well. For Thomas, if there was no allegiance one way or the other, what team was his sister on, sister of sisters? And the funny thing is, I do actually, so I am pretty bad at knowing, well, I don't know that I know an NSYNC's song. What's the NSYNC's songs? Well, I guess it's going, going to be.

0:05:40 Lindsey: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

0:06:07 Thomas: May. Yeah.

0:06:08 Lindsey: Yeah, um. I.

0:06:10 Thomas: Hold on. Maybe I'll Google it. NSYNC top hits.

0:06:13 Lindsey: Can think of a few songs. But I can't remember whether they're Backstreet Boys or NSYNC.

0:06:16 Thomas: Exactly. So I think I remember the Backstreet Boys ones a little better. And I think the reason is my sisters did listen to the Backst Street Boys. I don't remember them listening to NSYNK. Wait, Bye Bye Bye. Oh, oh, I thought that was Backstreet Boys. Oh, so I, nevermind. I already, you know, contradicted what he just said. I thought Bye Bye Bye was Back Street Boys. Okay. I remember that, I So the answer is, I guess Backst Street Boys and definitely my sisters, I think, were into that.

0:06:16 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah.

0:06:47 Lindsey: Gotcha.

0:06:48 Thomas: Because, you Know, they had nice harmonies, you Now, I was like, like, all right, got some harmonies going, but yeah, I was never, I don't think I was the target audience for that.

0:06:48 Lindsey: Sure. Yeah. Probably not. No, wait.

0:06:57 Thomas: All right. In a slightly more serious question.

0:07:00 Lindsey: Wait, wait, but who. Was I into?

0:07:00 Thomas: Oh, oh, sorry. Yeah. Who are you into? Oh my God. So Lindsay has left the show, everybody. Um, I've, I have clearly, yeah.

0:07:03 Lindsey: Yeah, I was more into Nickelback. I knew it. It's gonna be our last Q&A.

0:07:13 Thomas: Oh, that was the bombshell you were waiting to drop. That's good.

0:07:14 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah for sure.

0:07:16 Thomas: Cause I was worried that it was going to be like a, you know, race and IQ claim that you were or something, you're going kind of Sam Harris us.

0:07:22 Lindsey: No.

0:07:23 Thomas: But no, you did something even worse, which is you said you like Nickelback, which that's fair. Wait, what? Really? How old am I? How older are we? I always forget. Here's the thing about Nickelback. Nickelback fucking sucks. And I hate Nickelback and they're the least sincere bullshit crap.

0:07:25 Lindsey: Yeah look I was eight so well I know that now.

0:07:42 Thomas: Yeah, but no, no, hold on. I'm making a point. Then there was there's like a counter backlash a little bit. You know, there's the debunk to the debulk of Nickelback that people have tried to pull, like, Nickelback's not actually that bad. You just hate them because the whole world started hating them and it became a meme. And I would like to debunk that debunk by saying, no, I've always hated them even in the 90s before it was a meme, honest to God. I mean, I don't think it's that far-fetched to believe that I, Thomas Smith, didn't like a thing that people liked. I feel like I have credibility on that front. And Nickelback is the most insincere garbage generic rock, the the production, everything about it is insincere. It's entirely like they took Nirvana, which, you know, say what you, a lot of people don't like 90s grunge, that's fine, I get it, you had to be there a little bit, but

0:08:01 Lindsey: Yeah no.

0:08:34 Lindsey: Sure.

0:08:35 Thomas: At the very least Kurt Cobain sincere, you know, like there's certain musicians where you're like, even if you don't appreciate it, you're like, well, that, you know, I, that person is a sincere artist. Like they are doing art, like they're doing what they want to do in a way that's not like I'm trying to sell, you know, like you only sell a bunch of albums, you Now, and, uh, it's Nickelback is like taking all of that nineties grunge and putting it into like a, don't IBM Watson machine and being like, all right, let's come up with a perfect salesman version of that. Like, I can't even, I don't if I'm expressing it well, but even in the music, in the production, it sounds like that, like his voice, look at this photograph, like it's all this consistent, consistent tone

0:08:39 Lindsey: Oh yeah. Yeah I

0:09:16 Thomas: And yeah, I hate it.

0:09:18 Lindsey: Went to a Nickelback concert. Shouldn't I shouldn'T be admitting this on the air. This is a terrible idea.

0:09:19 Thomas: You yeah the ramen Picture also kind of applies to that guy, doesn't it? Didn't he have some good top ramen hair? Yeah.

0:09:25 Lindsey: Yeah. I think he did, yeah.

0:09:32 Thomas: Anyway.

0:09:32 Lindsey: Chad.

0:09:32 Thomas: That terrible. You should have known. Here's the, I'll make a controversial claim. And, and you know what? We're both here being hated, or you're here being hated so far. I'll join you. I think the first Creed album is pretty good. There, I said it. Creed is better than Nickelback by a million. And some of their songs were actually kind of good. Unlike Nickelback, who had zero good songs.

0:09:33 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, no, I don't dispute any of this. I, I, I have a lot of self-hatred over this, um,

0:10:01 Thomas: Don't worry. People will hate me just as much for saying Creed had some okay songs.

0:10:02 Lindsey: Okay. All right, good, thank you, that's you. Know, I appreciate. The Gesture. Here.

0:10:07 Thomas: Yeah. Trying to take Some of the incoming fire with you. All right, uh, now that we've lost all our listeners, general. Contact, unit, problem child, this one, I'm, I'm, I'm interested in this, this is, could this be a a real podcast battle here. Contact, you, a problem child says, "Last month, PZ Myers was streaming with Kevin Logan, Christy Winters, Christy Winter's longtime friend of the show, no, I, good peeps over, over there, good people, and he expressed a dislike for evolutionary psychology. I was in the chat so I asked him to clarify if he rejected the entire field. He said he did because he believes it's based on false premise, the idea that all human behavior is ultimately the result of evolutionary selective pressures.

He said that's possible for traits, traits that aren't helpful or even slightly deleterious to hang around, get spread, so long as they don't seriously hamper for survival. He used colorblindness as an example of a trait that's not helpful but also not dangerous enough to be selected out. Christy chimed in to say she's suspicious of evo psych because its claims are usually non-falsifiable, and PZ agreed with her. How would Lindsey respond to those criticisms of"

0:10:14 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah.

0:11:07 Thomas: Her field? Wow, direct shot at your entire thing. Okay.

0:11:12 Lindsey: Yeah, know, this, I'm aware of PZ's, uh, um, what's the, the word, he's, he said that he despises evolutionary psychology in other forums, so yeah, I, I know he doesn't like evolutionary psychology, um, but I get the sense from, like, I think, I think the first time that I dug into his criticisms were, was when we did our first recording together, um, and, you know, I haven't really kept up with him, but I, I went and looked to see if, you know, his criticisms have changed at all, they don't seem to have changed, he seems to be saying approximately the same things that he used to.

And I get the sense that PZ's impression of the field isn't based on actually reading much research in evolutionary psych. It seems to be based mostly on the public conversation about this area, which unfortunately, as we've discussed at length elsewhere, seems to me dominated by right-wing assholes who have an agenda to biologize, right? And I don't blame PZ for this, right. I think that most exposure to disciplines other than our own does happen in the public sphere. It's from hearing what's going on in the public sphere, so I get that. I will say, though, that I am mildly annoyed that he's chosen to criticize it as loudly as he has and as persistently as he has without doing more reading, right? But whatever.

0:11:32 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:12:23 Lindsey: So the idea that the entire field is based on the premise that all behavior is the result of evolutionary selective pressures is just not true. Uh, yeah, so in like the first week of my undergraduate course on evolutionary psych, we talk about genetic drift, which is exactly what Peasy is describing there when he says that, like, it's possible for traits that aren't helpful or even slightly deleterious to persist, right, and not because they're being selected for, not because they have a function, but just because they don't do enough harm to be selected out, right? We talk about that. It's not an assumption that everything is the result of an adaptation. So, so, I mean, we talk about that, we talked about byproducts, which are, you know, features that are sort of carried along with adaptations, but they don't serve a purpose. We're actually going to talk about one of those in a minute. And we talk hallmarks of the design, right, right, which you have to establish in order to claim that something's an adaptation.

0:13:09 Lindsey: So yeah, I hope that he's being somewhat hyperbolic when he says that evolutionary psych ascribes everything to selection. But I don't know. It's hard to tell if he's being hyperbolic or whether he really thinks that.

0:13:25 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, think it's a little bit. I love PZ and, you know, he has very strong opinions, as do I, of course. But I do feel like on this one, he's he's gone a little too far. Seems like I look, it's very fair based on, you know, the recordings we've done and our conversations. It seems fair to say the field is rife with people misusing it, or at least even people who aren't in the field mislabeling themselves are being mislabeled and misusing it. And it's even possible, maybe, I don't know if you'll agree, but it's Even possible that this field specifically is more prone to that than a lot of other ones, just because it lends itself to like pop psychology, you know, evolutionary explanations for the just so story stuff you're talking about. Now, not to

0:13:31 Lindsey: Sure. Yeah, I

0:14:10 Thomas: Say that within peer reviewed journals or anything, I'm not commenting on that, but just in like the public kind of arena, I think it's pretty easy for people to abuse this field, maybe more so than others. What do you think?

0:14:22 Lindsey: I think that's fair, right? But I'd say that that's true for a lot of areas, right, Like social science in general, anything that deals with humans, I think has the Potential to be misused, um, whether evolutionary psych is maybe more prone to that than some areas, like, yeah, I think you could make that case, but

0:14:27 Thomas: Yeah. Right. You know, I, I wanted, I don't necessarily want to call this person out. I don't know this person, but it's somebody who I just saw published a book recently called "Sex, Power, and Partisanship." I mean, I guess you can look up what it is, but still, I'm not, I don't know this, but I'm not trying to call them out or anything, but I saw this and I thought it was funny and like apropos of what we're talking about, and the subheading is "How Evolutionary Science Makes Sense of Our Political Divide," and then in their note about like, oh, here's a thing I did, they said the publisher called me an evo psychologist for marketing. I am not, since I am not doing the empirical work. It's more accurate to say I'm an evolutionist and a clinical psychologist who thinks that evo site can bring stunning clarity to some crucially important human problems.

0:14:40 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:15:28 Thomas: Here I discuss political division as one of them. So, like, that's kind of what I'm talking about. Like, it's really easy to be like, yep, evolutionary psychology is like, this person isn't an evolutionary psychologist, and even their publisher is calling them that.

0:15:34 Lindsey: Right. Right, yeah, I've got a a blog post, it's a little bit old at this point, but I think it's still a a good rebuttal to a lot of criticisms that pz PZ has registered and continues to register. It's by Robert Kurzban, who is an evolutionary psychologist, and I think that his analysis of PZ's points is a good one. So I'll give you that to put in the show notes.

0:16:00 Thomas: Right, good stuff. We got another General Contact Unit Problem Child question that I'm actually interested in, too, which is, Why do so many humans think puppies are cuter than actual human babies? I mean, is it just a cultural preference in the West, or do people everywhere think puppies are cute? If it's universal, why would we find another species more appealing to look after than our own offspring? I remember once seeing an interview with a scientist, he might have been an evo-psych, but I don't recall, who suggested dogs might be regarded as something like a nest parasite because they get humans to look at them. Them without offering any benefit. Well, look, I don't, yeah, I don't think that's true of the evolution of dogs is really interesting. I'm sure I've seen or read something about that over the years.

0:16:35 Lindsey: Harsh, bro.

0:16:43 Thomas: Like they definitely provided a benefit, but like nowadays, I guess not really as much.

0:16:43 Lindsey: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, they're awful cute. That seems beneficial.

0:16:50 Thomas: Yeah, no, but I mean like some other benefit beyond like being appealing to us. Like, you know, back in the day, it seems like they co-evolved with us and we, you known, we fed them scraps that that they would look after or do, provide some sort of safety, you know, whatever, for us, uh, through throughout history. It's really, oh, it's amazing how far it goes back, that humans were like domesticating dogs. It's super cool, um, any evo psych thoughts about this, Lindsey? Yes.

0:16:58 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's really cool. Yeah I got some, I got some thoughts. So first I've got a question. So Thomas, have your views on the cuteness of your cats changed at all pre pre baby to post baby?

0:17:25 Thomas: Absolutely. I was going to mention this first off, I'm not a big dog fan. I never have been. I, I'm not, I don't hate them, just not a huge fan. I think that see, I'm so dedicated to drawing incoming fire from your Nickelback comment that I will say, I don't like how much our society likes dogs, but I deal with it. I live with it, I get it. Um, I'm okay with that. I like, you know, I, I 60% like dogs and then the whole rest of society, 100% loves dogs to, the, to an extent that is weird to me. And it's, but whatever, it's not like I hate them.

Just don't get it now. But I was, I was going to very much say, um, our cats were providing that cat outlet, um, for my maternal instincts, for sure, you know, I was, I was really into the cats and then we had babies and I was like, what are these fucking cats doing here? I don't need them. Like, what are they? They they go from like the cutest things, you know, because they're, they're, they're the focus of those instincts anyway, and then they're just like, what is this rat thing that barfs everywhere doing in my house? Why do I have these things? What is the point? And I

0:17:27 Lindsey: Yeah, Yeah.

0:17:59 Lindsey: Poor kitties.

0:18:28 Thomas: Think soon. Soon they will go back to being kid. Like, Phoebe's already a kid. It's weird. She's not even close to a baby anymore. It's, it's, it's been interesting noticing how my, like, instincts are changing to. She's bigger. It's a different relationship. Like the whole the whole instinct evolves a little bit. I think the whole relationship evolves a lot, bit, she's, she's so tall and lankie and different, different. Meanwhile, Arlo's right in that peak, oh, he's just a loaf of bread, he's just that little, those cheeks, you know, he's just got that baby fat still. He's getting big, he's two, so he's, he's running around but he's still, ah, you just want to eat him. But yeah, I think once my kids get past that phase, then enter the cats back into the picture. That's what I'm thinking.

0:18:44 Lindsey: Yeah? Yeah.

0:19:11 Lindsey: Okay. Well, I'll be interested to hear updates about that. But yeah, no, that's so, that's, that's great. The first thing that I wanted to say about this question was that you want to avoid conflating cuteness with, like, the motivation to care for, which I think the question does a little bit. I mean, cuteness is part of, I think, the evolved structure that like motivates us to care, but it's not everything, right? So There's some evidence, and I was actually surprised by this, there actually is some evidence that indicate that, like, cuteness ratings, if you compare babies and puppies, that it is slightly higher for puppies, puppies. It's, it's pretty close between the two

0:19:23 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

0:19:44 Thomas: But what about your own kids. I feel like that's other people when I'm dialed, here's the thing. When I click on a picture of your baby or something, or click like or whatever when you're sharing, most of the time, because I'm dialed into my baby's faces, your baby doesn't look like the same thing to me. I'm like, all right, but I get that you feel that way about your baby, and I love that. So I want to show the love and support about that, that I'm sure other people did for me. And everyone thinks their own kids are the cutest. And that's fine. I's fine with that. We all think our own kids have accused. That's how evolution pretty much works. But But that's what I was going to say with the puppy thing. If you're rating a random puppy and a random baby, I think even I would be like, well, the puppy's cuter. Yeah.

0:19:45 Lindsey: Oh, Yes. Yes. Yep.

0:20:15 Lindsey: That's right, that's Right. Nope. That's perfect, um, yeah, I wanted to make the same point when it comes to, to your offspring. Yeah, I think that you're not, it's not, you're not going to find the same, the same kind of effect, but yeah, as you say, if you compare just like random pictures of babies and puppies, um, yeah, puppies have a slight edge, but where they don't have an edge is perceptions of vulnerability, need for protection, and self-reliance.

0:20:32 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:20:44 Lindsey: Those are all, like, way higher for infants. And those are all part of, I think, the schema, right, in terms of being motivated to care for human infants.

0:20:45 Thomas: Yeah. Mm-hmm. This is super interesting. I have so many thoughts. I want to clarify that I'm not saying your kids aren't cute, everybody. They are definitely cute. I think that, but I really think, and I want you to know, this is me speculating, and let me know if you know of any basis for this. But I really feel like my experience of for me with the kids is I get so dialed into them, their specific faces that even I think I've mentioned this before, but it's shocking to me. Even pictures of my own kids from like six months ago. I'm like, who is that? What what? Like, I'm so dialED into what they are now. And I feel like, you know, evolution wise, you you would need that. That. Like I need to be exactly dialed into what my kid is right now. Cause that's the thing that I'm protecting and feeding and all that stuff. And so like even picture old pictures of my kids, I think it'll change. Like, I think over time that'll all even out and everybody else's kids will get a lot cuter to me.

0:21:02 Lindsey: So, so canceled.

0:21:47 Thomas: But I think when I'm specific, it's like with the cats, like when I am specifically dialed in to my cute little kid's face, cause I need a protect this thing and be like able to recognize it in situ, you know, in the jungle or whatever the hell we're talking about. Evolution-wise, that's my theory. I'm going to publish a book about it and say I'm an evolutionary psychologist and I've solved the problems, but that's, that'S my theory, what do you think?

0:21:59 Lindsey: Yeah. Awesome. Sounds great to me. Yeah. Yeah. And also, the other thing I wanted to add, just going back to that co-evolution piece that you were talking about at the beginning, um, I mean, we we have selectively bred traits into dogs and cats that we find attractive, right? And part of that is, are these

0:22:19 Thomas: Yeah, like not being able to be born on your own or survive, you know, like with dogs, not being a horrible genetic mess, those traits, yeah,

0:22:31 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, those traits, right? But also, like, neotenous features, um, which is like when, when, uh, an adult retains certain, like, uh, features that are, that are typical of juveniles, and so, like, yeah, people should, if they haven't seen documentaries about the domestication of dogs and, like, the Russian fox experiments and stuff, definitely go watch that. I can find some, some links, um, because what they showed is that if you just select for, like, reduced aggression, you end up getting traits that look very puppy-like, right? They're sort of carried along with that. So, like, you, they, they did this with foxes, right? They were selecting for reduced aggression and, like, being more friendly toward humans. And they accidentally started sort of selectively breeding these foxes that had floppy ears and larger eyes and shorter noses, right? So they started to look more like dogs. So that's the other thing I'd say too. We have created pets that

0:22:51 Thomas: Mm-hmm.

0:23:21 Thomas: I mean, mean, look at corgis yeah, I isn't there the thing with the cats' meows are specifically for us, like, they don't, you know, it's not some, like, intercat language where, like, they're out on the cat street, like, "meow, meow," day to you, you know, like they don't. I think I'm pretty sure, this could be one of those, uh, you know, non-vetted, uh, social media facts, but I'm pretty sure their meow is not for each other, like, that's specifically for, for us. And, and I think I've seen that, like, it's grown to mimic babies over time, like, more, but that's, we'll have to follow up

0:23:22 Lindsey: Look cute to us. Yep. Mm-hmm.

0:23:55 Thomas: On that. That's my, yeah.

0:23:55 Lindsey: That's interesting. Yeah, I don't know about that, but that's that's super interesting that's

0:23:58 Thomas: Yeah. All right. Jason Bonilla says, how do you talk about atheism and religion to your kids? I tell my eight-year-old it's fairy tale like frozen that some people think is real and that it's silly. I also tie it to white supremacy, racism, and discrimination because, well, it is. How about you? I have done that exact move, not specifically on religion because religion as a concept hasn't come up, but sometimes when it's like something is depicted in a movie or something, you know, it's, like, oh, an angel or a goat, something quasi-religious, I have doing that exact thing. Oh, it is pretend. Oh yeah, that is just pretend 10, like frozen, you know, or whatever, like powers or like whatever. So I have done that exact thing and I can plan on continuing that.

0:24:34 Lindsey: Yeah. I'd say it's it's similar for us. I mean, when my stepson was younger, we did a lot of the, you know, some people believe X and then some people belief Y kind of stuff. But like, um, as he's gotten older, I think that those conversations have gotten a lot more frank rank. I do try to be careful about keeping the conversation at the level of ideas and institutions rather than individuals' beliefs, because I don't want him to see our views on these things as like permission to be shitty to somebody because they believe in God, you know? But yeah. So yeah.

0:25:09 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I agree. I want to avoid that too. You know, it's like on deep in my core, fundamentally, like just talking about pure fairness, pure logic, pure, whatever. I'm still like a Reddit atheist from 2011 or something where it's Like, all right, but it is really fucking stupid that everybody believes this stuff. Like I still feel that way in the inside. The same way with vaccines. It's really, really fucking stupid that people won't get vaccinated and don't accept it. But I realized that like, you know, in terms of tactically and interpersonally, it's better off if you're not an asshole.

So I want to try to like help my kids to not be that way and see how good of a job I do. We'll see. I don't really apply the same thing to Trump support though. That's like, you know, everyone has their limits. Like, no, fuck, fuck those people. I don't, like, honestly, I don'T care if my kids are like, oh, you're Trump support? Fuck you, racist. Like I don't- yeah, I DON'T care. I I, WOULD care for religion, which, which says something, I think. Like. I DONT want them to be like, YOU'RE A CHRISTIAN? PFFT, FUCK YOU, IDIOT. You know,

0:25:46 Lindsey: Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a tough one.

0:26:12 Lindsey: Right.

0:26:12 Thomas: Like. That'S not nice. Cause maybe some Christians are good people, but no Trump supporters are good. No, I'm kidding. Oh yeah. We'll see. All right. The Ballin asked motherfucker asks, how many digits of pie can you remember and recite by the time this Q and A airs? Well, the last part's irrelevant. Cause I wasn't going to go and memorize any, but in my eighth grade, I one of my classrooms, pie was on the wall, like there's like, you know, how classrooms have all those little, you know, things, like not just posters but like those long, I don't know what you would call it, like long, yeah, right.

0:26:22 Lindsey: Yeah. I know what you're talking about, yeah, they're like runners or something, banners. That's

0:26:48 Thomas: There you go, something like that, and pie was on one of them, and uh, I didn't really like try to memorize it, but I remember that's 3.1415926535789 or something like that, and I always remembered because that was the part that was like front and center. Here, let's see what I did. See how I did? I think I probably messed up some of those. 3.14159265359. Oh, wait, but that's rounded. Hold on. Where's the first? Here we go.

0:27:17 Thomas: 26535897. Okay. I mixed those up. So yeah, those were like the digits that were like right in front of me. And I remember from eighth grade, I just like retained that information. So there's your answer. It's useless. Lists and I don't

0:27:26 Lindsey: Cool, yeah. That's exactly how many digits I was able to recall, as well, so no, no, yeah.

0:27:30 Thomas: Really. Yeah. Ellie Bartlett asks, Lindsay mentioned it briefly in the end of gender episode, but could you all do a brief profanity laden takedown of autogynephilia? It's kind of a toxic idea that keeps popping up. Refresh me. What is this?

0:27:48 Lindsey: Yeah, so uh, autogynephilia, um, is part of this model of, um, this guy called transsexualism, right? Um, so Ray Blanchard's a sexologist, um, he published this, this model if, um, I think what we would say is uh, transgender gender identity, right, in 1989. And so the entire premise of this model is that trans women are not women, but are in fact men who are confusing their sexual orientation for their gender identity. And so Blanchard said that there were two types of, quote, transsexuals, homosexual transsexuals who transition because society accepts straight women more than gay men, and autogynephilic transsexuals who become sexually aroused at the thought of being or feeling like a woman, which is rooted in, he said, is rooted in sexual orientation being turned inward toward the self, so you're straight, but you're sort of narcissistically in love with yourself, and so you develop this fantasy of having sex with yourself as the other gender, I think, is the idea.

0:28:44 Thomas: Like you're so into that, that you, that's why you are transitioning or whatever? What

0:28:50 Lindsey: Think? Yeah, yeah, I think that that's his take on it, right? So it does feel a little Freud-y.

0:28:53 Thomas: A weird you know, Occam's razor,

0:28:56 Lindsey: I don't know, yeah.

0:28:56 Thomas: Yeah, Like, don't, that feels like a long way around, that feels like the less obvious logical choice here, like that's what you have to go to to explain this thing? I don't know. It seems weird.

0:29:08 Lindsey: Right, rather than just maybe their gender identity is what they say it is, right? So

0:29:11 Thomas: Yeah. Especially like listening to what they say and like, no, no. Shut up. I don'T care about what you say. I have this weird theory about what you are doing. That feels weird to me.

0:29:13 Lindsey: Yeah. Right. Yeah. It is a little weird, yeah, um, but I do, I do want to acknowledge that um, apparently there are some transgender people who who like this theory and they feel that it describes their experience well, and from from what I understand, I mean, so like if that's, if that is true, then I mean great, right? Who am I to argue with that, right? Um, and I think that like, like, some of the descriptive accuracy, according to some people, might be because, like, prior to transition, are some elements of fantasizing about having sex as the other gender, right?

0:29:54 Lindsey: But that's, you know, some – I think a lot of people think that that's because your gender identity doesn't match your sex assigned at birth, right, and so once somebody goes through a medical transition, those fantasies tend to go away, right. Right. And so that's that doesn't seem to be consistent with Blanchard's sort of formulation here. But

0:29:54 Thomas: Yeah, this feel like this theory relies on if you were truly a man, you fantasize about a woman. And if you're truly a woman, then you fantasized about a man or something like, you know, like doesn't don't you think it kind of is reductionist in that way? And that and that actually sexual the attraction is a little more complicated than that. Like I know women who they watch porn, they're straight women, but what they're watching in porn is the woman because like that's, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know if I'm articulating that well.

0:30:34 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Right. Because of like identification or

0:30:45 Thomas: Yeah.

0:30:45 Lindsey: Something. Right?

0:30:45 Thomas: Yeah, it's more about an identification and like, that's what turns them on. And this is purely anecdotal, but like, I feel like it could that be at play a little bit. It? Like if you are actually a woman, if you were identifying in that way, would that read as, oh, I see, you're actually just attracted to yourself, you Know what I mean? I don't know if I made that point well, but that's a jumble of thoughts that I think kind of makes sense. What do you think?

0:30:46 Lindsey: Yeah. Yes. Know. I like that. And I think that Natalie Wynn actually made a very similar point in one of the video essays that she did where she she tackled autogynephilia, which I would recommend to people. I thought that that was, uh, it was it was very informative to me, at least. I know she's maybe kind of controversial to some folks, but um, but yeah, so she she makes a a very similar point to the one that you just did, yeah.

0:31:19 Thomas: Oh, okay. Well, I can't be that dumb I was. All right. No reasonable person would have ever thought I voted for that frozen baby. Great opening arguments reference asks, with all the science news as of late and the subsequent pseudoscience, do you think the Deborah Soe, Brett Weinstein's of the world who should know better actually believe the ideas they're promoting? Or do you Think they're just riding in Trump's wake to start conversations that garner the attention of masses of people? I think they actually believe it personally. I think that most of the time. Go ahead. Sorry.

0:31:33 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:32:03 Lindsey: Agree With That, nope. No, no, I totally agree withthat Like, you um know, I I think that there are some cynical people out there that are just sort of being opportunistic. I mean, I'm thinking of the Alex Joneses and Rush Limbaugh's of the world. Like, they don't believe their own bullshit.

0:32:20 Thomas: Not all of it, you know, but maybe some of it. It's hard to know.

0:32:21 Lindsey: But, yeah, maybe. I don't know. Like, from what I know about folks like that, like, it really does seem to be very calculated and very cynical. And I don'T think that they believe it. I think they're just grifters. But yeah, from hate watching all of these episodes of the Dark Horse podcast, I do get the sense that Brett and Heather are sincere. And they're just, you know, they're ignorant of the cultural conversations that they're talking about, essentially. You know, They think about everything in terms of like, you Know, quote, unquote, scientific facts. But the only reason that anybody cares about, You know certain facts is because they're part of this public discourse and Brett and Heather just don't don't know about that discourse. Course. So yeah, I don't know about Depp or so. I don'T want to speculate, but yeah, Brett and Heather, I think believe it.

0:33:06 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I think I pretty much agree. I think that you don't get anywhere by trying to always say that people don't believe the things that they say, youknow, like they do. People did that with Trump. And And like, I think while it is true that he doesn't believe the things he said, it's more true that Trump didn't care about the things he said and like didn't truly didn't care about the truth of things he said. And so therefore, it doesn't really matter if he what he believes, like it really didn't. He You is a special category person who was willing and able to say anything.

And I do think he was able to convince himself of whatever is convenient. And so in that sense, like when he called about when I listened to that whole phone call with Georgia officials or whatever about the election stuff, get me the 1,200 votes or whatever the hell it was. I can't remember. And like when I know I'm going to a bit of a tangent here, here.

But one thing, one stance I'm proud of that I don't know that will matter is I was always pushing back against the idea that Trump was losing his mind or, you know, was like, oh, he's going senile or he's got dementia.

0:33:18 Lindsey: Right.

0:34:16 Thomas: I'd never bought that. And I think that phone call was evidence of that. Like he's perfectly lucid. It's just, and, and you know he's old. So like, obviously he's, I'm not saying he's like mentally in his twenties or something, but like he's perfectly lucid in terms of a person that age but he genuinely has a connection to truth that none of us has and can identify with where it's like he it's it's blurred line between does he know what he's saying is bullshit does he care or is is he lived a life of being able to make the shit he says turn true that he you know like how would you have a relationship with truth if you had a a lifetime of that. Things you say turn true.

So maybe you do believe it. But anyway, that's Trump. That's a special case. The I was going to make is I think this is a way that people try to make the world a little easier than it is. I think that sometimes people want to believe that the truth is really easy to know and the people who are like Brett and Heather, they just know it but are cynical and trying to make money and whatever and that part of me feels like a little bit that's a cop-out a little but you know in some cases where it's like I don't know things are really hard and honestly it is true that if you grow up watching Fox News not that they necessarily did but I did then

0:34:50 Lindsey: Right, yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah

0:35:39 Thomas: Those things are true to you like you think those things are like the power of a an alternate ecosystem of information is that you do believe different things um and I don't think it's the case that all these people are always like cynically just saying whatever I think they can very easily be convinced of their own crap all So Jay Young asks, I was hoping there could be an episode in the near future about a toolkit for evaluating papers cited in support of problematic ideas for those of us that don't have technical training in research methodology. For example, I recall the episodes on that paper about police shootings and the ones on the end of gender. What I was thinking was tips for what questions to ask when encountering things like this so that we don't have to get another degree or wait for future episodes breaking it all down. Wow, that's a tough one. What do you think? Hmm.

0:35:39 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:36:00 Lindsey: No, I totally agree with that.

0:36:32 Lindsey: It is very tough. That is a very tough question because I think that what Jay's essentially asking for here is like some reliable heuristics. And the problem is I've got I've got a couple, right? So I'm not going to refuse to answer the question, but there just aren't super awesome shortcuts for directly evaluating the quality of evidence in most studies that actually get published. I mean, they get through the peer review process for a reason.

0:36:54 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:55 Lindsey: And so you do kind of need subject matter expertise to really be able to spot the flaws in a lot of cases. And so, you know, this is a drum that we've been beating for a while now, but I really think your best bet is to try to get a sense of what the consensus is around a question. And, you that's probably the best heuristic, right? But so a couple of other things that I think can sort of clue you in about quality is to look at whether there are any conflicts of interest declared, right, as long as they aren't fraudulently neglecting to provide that information, as in the TASER study that we referenced earlier, this can, I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad study, but if it's study like testing a product and the company that produces that product is funding the research, yeah, you know, you would want to see those results replicated by an independent lab, right, before you took them super seriously, I think, because that's problem.

0:37:55 Lindsey: You can also look at the quality of the journal. So impact factor is sometimes used here. That can be kind of a problematic metric, but it's an indicator of impact of the Journal, essentially. Is it pay to play? You can usually ascertain that if you look at the Journals.

0:38:08 Thomas: Now you're just doing our penis hoax episode again basically everything about the journals that the conceptual penis people published in everything about that. Not that, I think.

0:38:13 Lindsey: Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. Yeah, pretty much, right? Yeah. So yeah, because pay to to play journals, right? Typically, people are publishing there because they can't publish in a better journal, right. So that's that can be a good heuristic. I think another one is, you can look at whether the topic of the paper seems to match the topic at the journal. So when we talked about that Dunning-Kruger effect, that the paper that claims it was a statistical artifact, those, those two papers that were published on this, weren't published in psych journals? So cues like that, I think, can be decent heuristics. You can also look to see if there have been responses published to the study and see what critics have said about it, that can give you some sense of, like, you know, if there are serious problems, what subject matter experts are saying those problems are. So I don't know, those are some things I think that you could look for. Yeah.

0:38:31 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm.

0:38:41 Thomas: That's interesting. Huh?

0:39:11 Thomas: I have found that like in these debunkings that you've done, oftentimes it's like, oh no, here the people on the IDW side are making the claim that science says X, and then it is a scientist often making that claim, but then when you look at the relevant scientist, they're like, no, not X, that has I feel like that's happened a couple times, I guess, is the point of, right?

0:39:32 Lindsey: Right. Yeah, no, I, I think, uh, yeah, I think I agree with that. I, um, mean, it might be a different, um, thing though for like published work versus like pure, you know, actual journal articles that have been published versus people talking about this and kind of the public sphere. I'm not sure, um, but yeah, I mean, in terms of like heuristics for evaluating methodology, like that's really hard. I mean, you can look for things like sample size and like other characteristics, those kinds of things can be sort of easy to spot, but if you're like, the, um, the question referenced that paper on police shootings, like I don't think there's a heuristic that would allow you to spot the problems with a logistical, with the logistic regression that they ran, you know, so there's uh, there's definitely a limit. Yeah.

0:39:44 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So. At some point you gotta listen to the show, or other great shows, but, you know, hey.

0:40:17 Lindsey: Or, or get it, or get another degree, I mean, you know.

0:40:19 Thomas: Yeah, all, and one more from, "No reasonable person would ever have ever thought I voted for that frozen baby." In episode 292, Dr. Osterman spoke about the way in which Hying was citing the evidence that spoke, sorry, there's some typos in here, that spike protein alone can damage endothelial cells, and that means that the vaccine will be harmful. "Can you elaborate on the differences between mutant spike protein as, as encoded by the vaccine versus the mutant spike protein created for the study." It said, "We've got a quote here. In the new study, the researchers created a pseudovirus that was surrounded by SARS-CoV-2 classic crown of spike proteins, but did not contain any actual virus."

0:41:05 Thomas: Exposure to the pseudavirus resulted in damage to the lungs and arteries of an animal model, proving that the spike protein alone was enough to cause disease. These tissue samples showed inflammation in endothelial cells lining the pulmonary artery walls, end quote. Once again, you're not exactly an expert in this. What do you think, though?

0:41:23 Lindsey: I am not, um, but Well, I, I did, I did go and looked at, I was, I, you know, I was sure that somebody had to have published something About this, since, you know, I think that Brett and Heather and others have sort of like really disseminated, disseminated the idea pretty widely that You know, the spike proteins might be dangerous. And I found a blog post, um, on, uh, like the Science magazine website by a scientist who actually directly addressed this concern. And the key points, as I read it, were that in an actual viral infection, people are generally inhaling viral particles, which means that the virus and the spike proteins are being introduced

0:41:31 Thomas: Mm hmm. Mm hmm, go straight

0:42:05 Lindsey: Directly.

0:42:06 Thomas: To your lungs.

0:42:06 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly, right? And so that obviously is going to cause vascular damage. But with the vaccines, they're delivering it into the muscle tissue, meaning that not all of the, well, meaning that virtually all of the spike proteins that the vaccine builds are going to be anchored to muscle cells, is what this person was saying. And so they're not going to be getting into the bloodstream, and so they are not going to be traveling to places that would cause that damage. And the Post also noted that while, like, a very small amount of vaccine, like 1% or something, might get into the bloodstream, it's still not sending like free pieces of the spike protein around the body to cause damage. Instead, it's like causing cells to express like an anchored version of the spike protein.

0:42:44 Thomas: Mm hmm? Yeah.

0:42:50 Lindsey: I hope I'm getting all this right. Like this is what I'm gathering from the way that this person described it. So

0:42:56 Thomas: Well, and my Memory of when we did this episode is this is something people are aware of, that the spike protein causes damage. And therefore, um, you would think the top scientists in the planet who are wanting to make a safe vaccine would account for that. And I trust them a little more than some YouTubers who have biology degrees, um, but it just goes to show, don't inhale your vaccine, you know, smoke it but don't exhale it.

0:43:10 Lindsey: Yes, you would. Yeah, don't. Yeah. And another thing that you brought up at the time that we recorded that was, is that it's um, it's like a piece of the spike protein, so with this, the way that this blog post described that is that, um, they, the spike proteins that are developed by the, or that are built by the vaccine, have like some targeted mutations that prevent it from doing the damaging thing. So, yeah, so for all of those reasons,

0:43:29 Thomas: Yeah. Boy.

0:43:43 Thomas: Thank god. Wow, well, that's lucky. So, or or maybe it was designed that way. Weird.

0:43:44 Lindsey: Yeah. Oh, You think, yeah.

0:43:49 Thomas: Yeah.

0:43:50 Lindsey: Weird.

0:43:50 Thomas: Either it's really lucky or the people in charge of this didn't want to kill people possibly. I know that's a tough, tough one.

0:43:51 Lindsey: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, nice of them.

0:43:58 Thomas: Yeah, see earlier when I said it's really hard to not just be like, you're a fucking idiot for not wanting to take the vaccine. But I know it's not productive. It's not product.

0:44:07 Lindsey: Well, yeah.

0:44:08 Thomas: All right. We can tackle one more general contacting a problem child, an avid questioner. We get to all of them. Sorry. But here's one more. Suppose Trump and Pence were both struck by lightning 24 months ago and Pelosi became president. Do you think the U.S.'s pandemic response would have been handled at all differently or better with a Democrat in the White House from the very start? A lot of my fellow far leftists have scoffed the idea that the pandemic would have gone particularly better without Trump.

I've seen that idea as well, side note, partly because the UK and Canada have handled the pandemic pretty badly as well despite having more liberal governments, but mostly because even if you just subbed out Trump for a Democrat, you would still have had other major factors that limited the US government's ability to respond properly, i.e. the fact that the federal government has very limited ability to tell state governments what to do and the factthat the GOP would still control at least one house of government and could maybe use that to prevent a Democratic president from doing anything to help people. Maybe you don't have as much anti-mass stuff because the president wouldn't be pushing it, but that might be about it. Well, I think this is a wide-ranging question that there will be like a 9-11 style commission about, like a gigantic report about, so it'd hard to answer here.

0:44:35 Lindsey: Yeah, Yep.

0:45:18 Thomas: I am very skeptical of the idea that the worst president, most incompetent president in history, who denied the science, turned masks into a political idea, a political battle, was worried about Fauci upstaging him, didn't hire people in positions, dismantled the pandemic response team. I'm very skeptical of the idea that that would have been a tie for whatever Pelosi would have done. I think that's asking a lot out of the the world. I think that there's a lot that could have been done. Um, one thing that I saw early on, again, it's, it'S really hard to evaluate this. This is a giant counterfactual question.

It's like one of the biggest counterfactural questions ever with the most variables possible, like the whole planet, you know, like it's it's hard to know. And I think there's room for people on either side to be like, well, it would have been nothing or it would've been the same or worse or whatever. But I, you Know, I did see that even stuff like the relationship with China, um, and the fact that like it's been a while, but but someone was spoke pretty convincingly about the fact that like back during Obama, we had better relationships with scientists in the in the field at the appropriate places that would have noticed the pandemic sooner, just not based on China being more open

0:45:39 Lindsey: Yeah, That's Interesting.

0:46:34 Thomas: Because they wouldn't. But because of these other signs that they're looking for, to like, there's... there's measures they have to do to detect what's going on because the information is not freely available. It's stuff like, God, I'm trying to think, it was stuff like medical supply purchases and like all this complicated factors that that, that this person was saying might have led to action a little sooner, but also having a better political relationship with China, which I think, you know, inarguably a Democrat would have had a better one, maybe not a perfect one, but somebody who wasn't saying China in every speech about how China's ruining the entire world and all that. So I

0:46:34 Lindsey: Yeah. Right. No.

0:47:14 Thomas: Don't know. I think there's definitely room for it to have gone a lot better, but obviously it's a really difficult counterfactual question. What do you think?

0:47:22 Lindsey: I, I don't have a ton to add to that, um, I'm inclined to agree. I mean, I mean, I take, I take on board the fact that there was a, there was a range of sort of quality of responses across a number of different countries that have different sort of political arrangements, but but yeah, it's hard to imagine a worse response. Thoughts, um,

0:47:40 Thomas: Yeah. Well, in the comparison to the UK and Canada, here's the fact. I hate the US. I ate my country, everybody. Let me assure you. But we are like the biggest economic powerhouse in the world and have been historically, at least until China takes over, you know, like for decades. So I don't know that you can grade apples to apples there and be like, our, the response of the richest country in the world should be the same as the UK or Canada, not to belittle the UK or Canada. But like, I think you could grade us a bit on a curve and we should have done even better and helped even more people around the planet, by the way.

0:47:40 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:48:18 Lindsey: I agree, yeah.

0:48:20 Thomas: All right. Let's see. Let, let's try one more. Tony Estevez says when Brett and Heather talk about their worry of long-term side effects, I am reminded of the grew paradox in a philosophy of science class. I took, I wasn't the best student in that class, but I think the premise was a scientific hypothesis has yet to be, sorry, has to be capable of being proven wrong. If your Your hypothesis was that emeralds are green until the year 2100, and then they turn blue. Therefore, emeralDS are grue, G-R-U-E. We just have to wait until 2100 to verify the hypothesis. Is Brett and Heather's worry scientific? We just Have to wait X number of years to see if there are long-term side effects. Is that just permission to move the goalpost? How do we determine a long- term causation?

0:49:08 Lindsey: Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't know that I have, I'd have to think about that, or I'd to learn more about that group paradox, maybe, because there might be something in that, um, but I don't necessarily think that having a concern about long-term side effects of some medical intervention is like a priori unscientific. Because plenty of things do have sort of chronic effects rather than acute ones. But what I think is really unscientific is that they're ignoring the fact that the claims by scientists that long-term side effects are extremely unlikely are not based on just six months of data, right? They're based on decades of research. So I, you know, that's the problem I have with their claim, but I don't know.

0:49:26 Thomas: Sure, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is this is amusing that some musings that people can certainly ignore or take with a grain of salt. But isn't there a bit of a difference between like I don't I could I could. I think there's a difference in potential side effects of like, for example, let's say we pretend all the vaccines were the same, but someone invented a needle that's like slightly better or something like it's smaller, able to whatever. Whatever. Couldn't you make the same argument? Well, we can't know the side effects of that needle. Maybe 30 years.

0:50:18 Thomas: It's like, all right. But like the thing happening is still the same thing happening. And maybe that's how this works. Of course, speaking as an ignorant non-scientist here, but I would assume that they've, as you said, there was like a 30 year history of, of this technology of looking into it.

0:50:17 Lindsey: That's right. Brand new needle.

0:50:33 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:50:34 Thomas: Is it, could it be that kind of thing where it's like? Yeah. Okay. The method of getting it there is different, but the response we're going for is tried and true. That's tested. We know what that is.

0:50:44 Lindsey: That that is my understanding.

0:50:46 Thomas: Okay. And it would be a tough way to do science if every single time you made a slight change to anything, you had to like, well, nope, sorry, you did a different color syringe. Got to check 30 years now. And I'm making a joke. It is different. It's definitely not anti-science to be concerned about long-term side effects of Something like this. I get it. I don't want to mock that. I just think that, as you said, to echo your point, there is evidence here and there, you know, the bottom line is I just truly believe that a global pandemic where millions of people are dying, these people have people's interest in, you know, have the best interest of the people at least somewhat in mind. And it's hard for me to believe that these scientists are not just trying to save themselves and their families and their countries and their whatever, but are actually in there to make to make bad decisions and cost people lives. Like, I just have a little more trust in experts than that.

0:50:46 Lindsey: Yeah. Sure.

0:51:47 Lindsey: Yeah, me too. And I think Brett and Heather probably think we're naive to have that position in this case. But yeah, that's good.

0:51:51 Thomas: Yeah, I you know, I'm reminded of some some here. I'll bring up some Internet things I've seen that were funny recently. First off, what I was going to say earlier is you've seen the like, don't mistake your Google search for my degree. You know that meme? And I recently saw a tweet that was like, don't mistake your Google search for my Google search, but with a degree. I thought that was really apropos to like maybe some of the answers on this episode where it's like, yeah, we're both Googling. But, you know, some people Google with a decree. And I think that actually is both funny and true. Like, you know, like when it when it came to programming and when I was working on programming, so I'm not an expert, by the way, but like when people at my office were like, how do you do all that? I'm like, I just Google it like I'm nicht doing anything special, just but I also think that like they probably couldn't do that in some cases, like you have to have some level of knowledge to know what you're looking for and how to apply it.

0:52:29 Lindsey: Yeah that's a very good point.

0:52:50 Thomas: But yeah. And I think that is valid. Like if you have a degree, if you have that background of knowledge, are better. As illustrated by that question where you're like, there's no heuristic for this. Like, exactly. You know, there are things that you just need that knowledge base to be able to sift through.

0:52:51 Lindsey: Yeah yeah it's True. I mean, I mean, even, even questions within psychology I sometimes struggle with when I'm doing lit searches, because I just, I don't know what the search terms are that that are gonna bring up the thing that I want. So yeah, that's a thing.

0:53:15 Thomas: Right. Yeah. And then the other thing I saw recently that's more apropos to this specific question was like, you know, the typical, "Oh, you're going to just not question what scientists say, what experts think without doing your own research?" And they're like, yes, literally, yes. What view of the world do you have to have that your 10 minutes of Googling is going to be better than what the CDC or some expert... You could be true. And I was going to kind of say this on the CDC episode.

You could be right in certain cases, or there could be a limited number of cases, of course, where the experts get something wrong, but you, it is impossible for you to know, or it's a very bad, um, methodology for you to think because the experts can be wrong that you, a non-expert, know for sure that you're right in this situation and they're wrong, because uncounted are really all the times which the CDC and the experts were right, like that's uncountted, but when you are just a guy on the internet like I am or something, you don't know which of those situations you're going to be in, so you can't just be like, well they got this one thing wrong, you know, like, that, that's not a good way to judge, uh, who to trust, like you can't know which situation you're in, there

0:53:56 Lindsey: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yes. Mm-hm, yeah.

0:54:36 Lindsey: Yeah, I'm vigorously nodding. I can't say it better,

0:54:39 Thomas: All right well, we're plum out of time, that was a lot of fun, I. I Will Get the June Post Up, and maybe I'll try to think of another joke for that.I don't know if it's going to be an NSYNC song. Probably not, but maybe something.

0:54:39 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, wait, Is there like a Nickelback joke maybe? I don't, yeah, mm,

0:54:52 Thomas: Do they have a June song? We got to get a good reference in. Either way, I think this method works great. I'll post once again on Patreon, post this thread early in the month. And as the episodes go by, if you think of a question, something, you know, that's on your mind from that episode, go post it on that thread. And, you can see here, we'll get to it. And it's, I think it's the easiest way for both Lindsay and I to be keeping an eye on questions and to have them to answer at the end of the month. Lots of fun. Thanks so much, patrons and and listeners, and Lindsay, most of all.

0:55:12 Lindsey: Yep, yep. Thank you, I think it's very generous that you're gonna allow me to come back for another Q&A after, yeah

0:55:28 Thomas: We'll see. We're If I had to unfriend everyone who likes the thing I hate, I would have no friends.

0:55:29 Lindsey: Yeah. Oh, I just want to clarify. I don't currently like Nickelback.

0:55:37 Thomas: You currently love Nickelback. You're wearing a Nickelback t-shirt right now as we record this.

0:55:39 Lindsey: Stop it. I do have I do have Chad's face tattooed across my chest, but that was a bad decision.

0:55:46 Thomas: You know, what's funny is I do actually kind of want to get that shirt that is Hanson and it says Nirvana on it, even though I like Nirvana. Like it's so funny in a weird way that I think I might get that. I think there's a Nickelback version of that, but I don't remember what it is. I'm going to buy it for you.

0:55:55 Lindsey: Yeah. God damn it.

0:56:05 Thomas: All right. See y'all next time.

0:56:15 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com slash SeriousPod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.