Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 684: Dangerous Mind

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

   

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Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at it. This is episode 684 of Cognitive Dissonance.

And see, so this is our, what, second, third long-form episode? Second one, I think, yeah. Yeah, so. Or third, maybe third. I don't know. Who knows? This is part of our new format, and you better enjoy it. New format stuff, so. And just a reminder, if you're listening to this episode and you are not a $2 patron, you are missing out on me reading

that audio to you prior to the discussion. So, every month we'll be doing a long-form episode. $2 patrons, $2 and up patrons, of course, get access to me reading the article to you. So you have that context for the discussion. So the article we're going to be talking about today comes from Slate. The article is Dangerous Minds. The legal world is slowly accepting that age 18 or 21 is not a magical moment of adult

brain maturity. Are we ready for what that means? I thought this was a very interesting article, different than I thought it was going to be going on. Yeah. You know, it started out, there's a very interesting thing that they talk about and they use a case and the case that they sort of talk about is a case in which someone grabs a gun in the heat of the moment and shoots somebody else, right? Kills them. And then that person is then tried as they were 18 at the time. Right.

Tried as an adult because you, in our rules, you're an adult at 18. And you get tried. And then they were like, life without parole. You're 18 life without parole. And then they appealed basically saying like the brain isn't actually done doing all its stuff to figure out how it kind of works yet. And they got a team of neuroscientists to talk about this and bring an appeal. And they wind up changing the laws in the state to lower the laws. This is Michigan, I think. Yeah.

Right? To lower the laws down. So it's now, so now they're actually raised the age a bit. Yeah. Only from 18 to 19 in this case. There's a nudge. Where you make these big decisions on whether or not someone is going to, you know, have to spend the rest of their life in prison because,

you know, life without the possibility of parole at 18, that's rough. That's their whole life. That's rough. And so, so they, they talk about how the brain isn't done with its decision-making sort of

process yet. And it doesn't really understand consequences of actions and things like that. But then gets into some really interesting like little side areas here too, because like at a point, they make a really great point in the beginning of the article

that the law has to have them. There's gotta be something. There's gotta be a hard line somewhere. There's gotta be a hard line somewhere. And the law has to have them. There's gotta be something. There's gotta be a hard line somewhere. There's gotta be a hard line somewhere. And the law needs this. And our human understanding might change over time, but we've gotta have these hard stops where we say this is an adult and this isn't an adult.

And it brings up a really interesting point that that may change based on activity. Yeah. Well, i thought there's a couple of things i thought were real interesting in this article the one is it explodes the myth of 25 which is a myth i had held myself and i think i've even talked about on the show so i had always read in other places many times and the article talks about it being repeated over and over again that the brain continues to mature until about the age of 25, at which point the brain is fully matured physically and such. And I had read this in so many places. And the article goes to great

pains to say the brain never stops maturing and changing. It never stops growing, maturing, and changing. And so that 25 thing is really just kind of an urban legend. It just floats around. It's not really based on anything terribly scientifically meaningful, which I thought was fucking fascinating because I had held that view for up until I read this article. I held that view. And so, and the article also, to your point, goes on to say, look, at about the age of 14 or so,

your intellectual cognitive decision-making is pretty much set. It's good. It works fine. The difference is that when we're younger, that decision-making can be much more heavily influenced by our emotions, by the context of a situation, by the speed at which we're required to make a decision. So at 14 or 15 or 18 or 19, we might have the cognitive ability to make a decision. But do we have the same kind of ability when your blood is up, when you're under pressure, when there's an emergent situation. Distractions. Distractions. And that answer seems to be no. And I will say it changed

my thinking because for a long time I had had this idea of 25 in my head. And I thought we should move a lot of big decision-making to that point of 25. If that's the truth, we shouldn't be able to sign contracts. Maybe we shouldn't be able to join the military. If I don't understand, if I am, this was my thinking before, if my brain isn't fully developed and I'm not fully capable of understanding the gravity of my decision-making, I shouldn't be allowed to make these life-altering decisions that we don't let kids make. Big decision. Right? But this article basically blows that out of the water and says, look, if you've got time to make a decision and you're not under pressure, then yes, an 18 or 19-year-old can make a reasoned and well-informed decision. The difference is for those young people, they can't make decisions under duress as well. Under duress, that shit kind of breaks down. And that's a really

interesting way to sort of think about that idea of intellectual and mental maturity, but it makes it real complicated for legal issues. So complicated. In fact, one of the judges, they have a quote here that I want to read. The judge says, I fear that the majority's opinion is a first step in making it the court's ongoing task to reconcile the legislature's sentencing scheme with every jot and tittle of new scientific evidence. Then they're talking about blah, blah, blah.

And it says, in her affidavit, scientists had offered evidence that brain development occurs up to at least age 25. And Clement expressed concern that such evidence would spur future changes. Quote, I assume that in the coming years, we will hear cases arguing that we should extend Miller's protection, this is the person who shot someone else, to those who are in their early 20s as well. As our understanding of neurological development continues to evolve in the future, must we reevaluate the line between youth and adulthood every few years?

And my answer to that is yes. Yeah, I know. Yes, because that's your job. Yeah. Because that's what we ask you to do. Because it's a hard job that you decided to sign up for. Thank you. And you need to think about these things.

And you need to look at our current evidence. Our evidence changes over time. That's how science works, right? It gathers more evidence. It's a method in which we see the world to then try to refine our decision-making based on the most recent evidence, right? The most recent evidence in testing. And if we find out that, yeah, things have to change, then things have to change. People are going to ask you as a judge to make judgments on brand new technology. Are you now saying that you can't make those judgments because that technology didn't exist before?

Because that's essentially what you're saying now when you say, are we going to have to make these? Yes, you're going to have to make these judgments. That's your fucking job. Yeah, I read that and I immediately thought of, you know, there was a time in legal history where certain kinds of people were considered lesser people, right?

And you could go to court and get adjudicated white. Yeah. So that was one of the things. You could go to court, and if you were Italian, you would not be adjudicated as white. If you could go, you could go to court and get adjudicated as being something other than white, based not just on your skin color,

but based on your ethnicity and we've we've given that up right like the courts have said that's no longer based in anything what that's based in is bad ideas yeah founded in racism right fucking eugenics or some right it's crazy so we've given that shit up because that was awful. We do this all the time in the courts. I think what's kind of fascinating to think about is that the role of science and the role of law are always going to be at odds with one another. There's always going to be tension. Because law is about making decisions and science is about investigation. And those things are always going to be at odds because they're not aiming to the same goal. And so law is in a tough spot, right? And I think the judge is

basically expressing kind of a resentment. Like, look, my job, my whole career, my entire field is about deciding and moving on. I decided, I moved on. I created a rule and a rubric. I fit facts into the rules and rubric. And that's what law is. And it's like, yeah, but like, maybe you have to do that over and over. Maybe that rubric has to constantly be adjusted. And that, I get why that might make you uncomfortable. Because if I, and I want to like offer some empathy. If I were a judge and I had been doing this work for 20 years and I had sentenced a whole bunch of 18 and 19 and 20 and 21-year-old kids to, and I think of them as kids. I really do. If I sentenced 18, 19, and 20-year-old kids to prison, because that's the rubric tells

me is my job to do. And then I find out after 10 or 15 or 20 years of doing this work that I've sentenced in immature, intellectually immature, poor decision makers to prison for a life. I would feel something about that. Right. So I understand like the emotional tension that that would create and why you might be reactive to that emotional tension. It doesn't mean you don't have a responsibility to do the work. Sure. But I do want to offer like a point of empathy because I thought, God, that would fucking suck.

Sure. Can you imagine finding out that you did that? Yeah. That would blow. You would feel terrible. Yeah. Because you'd be doing what you thought was right. And then you would find out that hundreds of times you got it wrong. The problem is, is I, when I read this, there's a big part of me that rejects the premise

and I'm rejecting the premise of, do we need life without parole? Oh yeah. You know what I mean? Like I reject the premise because what it, what this article sort of underlying is, is saying under in an underlying way and a sort of in a way that is not overt is that our sentencing is okay. And that the way we treat people when they do something wrong is to throw them away for a very long time. Right. And we need to be very brutal with our sentencing that doesn't treat the underlying problem of anything. All it is is vengeance-based, right? So we see somebody did something, they did a horrible thing,

and then we don't bother to find out why they did that horrible thing. What put them in the situation to do that horrible thing? In my opinion, so much of this could be like this entire scenario that happened. And I'm going to spell out the scenario. So the scenario is there's a kid in a car with a couple other kids. He's having a beef with another guy. And he says, hey man, hand me that happened. And I'm going to spell out the scenario. So the scenario is there's a kid in a car with a couple other kids. He's having a beef with another guy and he says, hey man, hand me

that gun. The other guy in the seat hands him the gun and he shoots this guy dead, right? Shoots somebody else dead. So much of that can be fucking removed if we don't allow kids to buy guns, right? Or we don't allow guns, right? You start taking away these avenues in which someone can do something rashly, whether they're 14 or 94, suddenly you stop this whole big cascade of problems that we have exclusively in this country about how gun violence happens and how common it is.

And if you are able to pull that away, then you don't have to worry about these kind of sentencing things. Are people who are bad going to do bad things? I do think that's true. But I also recognize that so many other countries have such a better grasp on rehabilitating people and making it so that these opportunities to hurt someone so randomly aren't as just available.

Well, you know, I think we've talked a lot in this show about the value of means reduction. Yeah. Means reduction, but we have the opposite of means reduction in this country because we fetishize the tool that makes murder the easiest, laziest thing that you can do. It takes no effort, no skill, none whatsoever to use a gun.

And you can hand it to somebody that figure out how to use it in a minute. Sure. Little kids have shot their parents. Right. So we fetishize these weapons and we make them wildly available rather than performing any means reduction, any social means reduction on this stuff. I think that there would be a different case for me to make if we made committing murder not spectacularly easy, but vastly more difficult. And then you brought somebody to me and you said, you know what? This guy jumped through all of these hoops to still kill somebody. And I would say, you know what? My heart doesn't go out to that person the same way as saying, well, somebody was 18 and

that's fucking immature and it's young. And in the heat of the moment, they had access to this fucking unbelievably dangerous murder weapon they shouldn't have fucking had access to. And because we as a society failed them, they were able to commit this terrible crime in a moment of passion. I am more sympathetic to that than I would be if we did all the other means reduction. The private guy. The private guy. I have no empathy for that guy. No sympathy for that guy.

Right? Like my heart cannot go out to that person. So I am, but we haven't done any of that social work. I'm right there with you. We've done none of it. We've done the opposite. Instead of, and the argument you hear all the time is like, well, you know, they're always

going to find a way. And it's like, yeah, but I don't want to help them. Why are we helping them? Why are we, but we do, we help them all the time. And it would be a totally different thing if he got out of the car with a knife and he went after this guy. Yeah, chased him down the street

and tackled him and stabbed, you know, Or fought him and lost. Right. Easily lose the knife in a fight. Right. That's a thing that happens all the time too. Right.

So like, like, you know, you recognize, what I recognized from this article was, there's this, there is a constant. And the constant that this article is playing around is that punishments are going to be harsh. Where do we set the limit on age? Punishments will be harsh. And I was just like, I reject the premise. Fuck you. Why do

punishments have to be harsh? Why can't we fix underlying problems? Why can't we work to change the way in which people see each other? And you know what I mean? Like, like genuinely, like, I mean, it's, it blows me away that we have nothing for these people who go to, who go to prison. We have nothing for them. They are literally felons forever. They're felons and they're, and they are turned into a bad person forever. They are forever a bad person in our country. If we don't give anybody the means or incentive

to change, then why in the world would we expect anybody to change? We lament our recidivism rates, but we do everything to make that. Well, but worse than nothing,

we do everything to make recidivism higher. Yeah. We pressure cook them. Yeah. So it's like, yeah. All right.

Well, I did my time. I'm going to go back. No, no, you're always going to be a felon and you got to, you know, put it on your job application.

You got to walk around with a fucking Scarlet A all the time. And you, we locked you up and we put you in violent, brutal conditions while you were locked up. And then, you know, you turned into in violent, brutal conditions while you were locked up. And then, you know, you turned into a violent, brutal person. We gave you no resources and somehow you didn't use the no resources to better yourself. It's awful the way that we treat prisoners and people who have been incarcerated in this country completely. And we incarcerate far too many fucking people.

Yeah. You go to jail here at the drop of a fucking hat. You go to jail, you know, you can end up in jail if you are, specifically if you're a poor person or a person of color. Yeah, man. You can end up in jail for some really relatively minor shit if the dominoes fall around. And if you're a person of color, chances are you'll get a much larger sentence in our country. So I agree with you that, like that the article absolutely has as its underlying foundation, like, hey, we're going to be awful. Yeah, we're going to be bad. But at what age should we do it? Can we be at least a little better about our badness? Right. Yeah. It's

almost like having a conversation like, I totally, it's almost like having the same conversation, Cecil. All right. So I recognize that you can't start beating your kids when they're babies. That's ridiculous. That's stupid. You don't beat a baby, but there's got to be an age. What age can I shake them? Can I start punching them in the fucking eye? Yeah. It's very similar. And you're like, wait a minute, maybe you don't punch them in the fucking eye. You know? Interesting. A very interesting set of things that they present in the article, though, about what people can make decisions on and when their decision-making process is not as good. And I want to give an example because they bring up driving. driver's ed car or the, the getting your license car at the, at the DMV, the kid might be very,

very attentive and very, very good at everything. And, but then the moment they're, you know, around phones or they got their friends in the car, they're playing loud music, everything changes and they can, you know, they can, the distractions are what caused the bad decision-making couldn't to make them a bad driver because driving is just literally a series of decisions, right? Sure, yeah. And so one of the things I wanted to say was, I was in driver's, well, you were in driver's ed when you went to school, right?

I was in driver's ed. Some students didn't take it, but I was in it. I took it, yeah. You had to have a learner's permit signed by your parents. And my dad was a professional driver. So my dad took me out to learn how to drive.

My dad was the one who, he taught me how to drive a stick shift. And then he was like out to, to learn how to drive. My dad was the one who, who he taught me how to drive a stick shift. And then he was like, okay, so now we're going to go out together. And he would sit and let me drive. And he would tell me all the things I needed to know. Cause he was literally like a nine to five commercial driver for trucks. So he knew he was, if there was anything, my dad was, he was an excellent driver, like an absolute, he didn't get into a single accident for like 50 years. And he drove a truck, you know, talking like millions of miles. He didn't get in an accident. So very,

anything I could say good about my father, he was an excellent driver. And so he would just drive with me and tell me what to do. And in those, in those, I'm not a very particularly good test taker. And so we would have to have these driving classes. And we had these big, I don't know if you had these, did you have the sit-down simulators?

Yeah, yeah. They were neat as shit, right? Yeah, they were. I did pretty good on those, right? They would give you a test score at the end out of five. And that would be like four, seven. You know, I'd mess a little, but it'd be like four, seven thereabouts.

I get in the car with Coach Rupert. That's who we used to go out with because the PE drivers would take a turn to drive us around. He was a coach. I'm just picturing my cat. His last name or his first name was Rupert. I don't remember. I have a cat named Rupert. I've just immediately pictured my cat wearing a hat

and a whistle. He was the wrestling coach. I vaguely remember it was Rupert or something like that was his name. I'm probably misremembering, but Rupert is what comes to mind because I know your cat's name. So maybe it is your cat in a coach whistle. I kind of hope that it is. But in any case,

the cat with a coach whistle would take me out and I'm driving along and I'd get threes, three and a half. That's not a five. It's still a passing grade, but it's never very good, right? I'd always be like, you know, I'd always be like,

oh, fuck, I didn't hit the signal or whatever. I'd kind of freak out a little, right? And'd always be like, you know, I'd always be like, oh, fuck, I didn't hit the signal or whatever. I'd kind of freak out a little, right? And I got my license eventually, and I haven't been in an accident ever. Like, maybe once I've been hit, right? I've been hit myself. You were a passenger in my car, and we got hit at a stop sign. And I've been hit from the rear end once, but I've never gotten to an accident where I've hit something in the entirety of my driving. I've been in an accident one time where I was hit in the rear and another time in Chicago where I was hit

in the rear, but I've never been in an accident where I've been the cause of that accident or wrecked a car or something. And so I think I'm a pretty good driver, right? There's a kid in my class who was 5.0 out of 5 every fucking time. What the hell?

This kid was just fucking money. He'd get in the car and he's 5 out of 5 every time. By the time he got his license at 16, by the time we were graduating, his license was suspended from speeding. Really? He was speeding. He was constantly speeding. As soon as he got his license, he was just like fucking going down the street at like 75 and a 35 all the time. And like they wound up pulling him over so many times. He literally

had his license completely taken away by the time he was 18. So he got it at 16, lost it two years later. I have no idea how long it took him to get his license back, but I remember how good he was in that moment. And this is a long way of saying, like, I agree in the sense that, you know, like when you're being, you know, sort of watched, there's a difference between what's happening and these split decision moments in your life, that's a big deal and heavy weight on a young person's shoulders. It's funny because I am teaching two people, I'm teaching two teenagers how to drive. I'm teaching my son and my stepson how to drive right now. Three days ago, I just drove with Finn and it is mind-numbingly terrifying to drive with a 16-year-old. It's actually scary to drive with a 16-year-old. And I am constantly of the mind that this is too

young. This is far too young. Too young to drive. To drive. I absolutely don't think that 16 is an appropriate age for people to start driving because I know my kids and I know their friends and I see 16 year olds and I know like why their insurance is so high. And it's because they crash cars all the time. Like we kind of already know they're not good drivers. Just pay to insure one. They are spectacularly expensive to insure because their decision-making is poor. Sure. And like, I can get in the car with Finn

or I can get in the car with Donovan and they're nervous because they're new drivers. But I'm always like thinking, my God, what's it going to be like when you're out on your own? Yeah. Because I see you guys around the house and if you see a fucking squirrel,

you know, you're off chasing it. Like, it's too young. And if you see a fucking squirrel, you know, you're, you're off chasing it. Like it's too young. And I, part of me is like, from like speaking sort of more broadly to the article, I think we do a lot of things based that are rooted, not in anything at all scientific related to age. So like 16 to drive, that's just made up, you know, 18 to join the military or vote or become a legal adult. It's all made up. It's all made up. You know, 18 to join the military or vote or become a legal adult. It's all made up. It's all made up. I think it would be good to bring some science into a lot of our decision-making with respect to how people are able, like, what kind of decisions should people be making at that age? You know, like, I think that that's a real reasonable interplay

that we're missing constantly because we've just kind of said like, it feels right. See, I haven't been around 16-year-olds in a long time, but I really felt like I was ready to drive and able to do it when I was doing it. Did you? I didn't drive at 16.

I didn't drive until I was out of high school. Okay. So I got my license. I went through driver's ed and BTW as a sophomore in high school, but then didn't have any car to drive or any experience driving. And so my dad was like, well, you're not getting a license until you get a car. And you can't use my car because he had to use his car for work. Sure.

So he was just like real protective around his car. So he literally never drove his car once. And so I didn't drive a car until I bought a car. And I bought a car from my buddy's mom and it was a stick shift. And I had no idea how to drive it. So it sat in her driveway because I didn't know how to drive at home. I gave her the money and she's like, okay, it's yours.

And I'm like, I don't know how to drive it. And so she actually drove it over to the train station and spent a couple of days teaching me how to drive a stick. Oh, good. Yeah, she was a sweetheart. She was a real sweet lady. And so she taught me how to drive it because it was a stick.

And then that's how I had my first car. Iilariously, I was behind the wheel of a car as a 14-year-old. So my dad, when we were fishing one day, there was a parking lot out in the middle of nowhere. And he was like, do you want to drive for a little bit? And I was like, sure. And so I had driven several times before I ever even went into that class and was legally able to drive. My dad was like, sure, you can get behind the wheel. Sure, I'm with you. Everything will be fine. And so he was actually really very helpful

with like learning how to do it and like helping me do it. But I remember like, so I, like what you're saying to me when you're like 16 is too young, I'm thinking, is it too young? I'm like, I don't know. I don't know the difference. But here's the thing is that when I say that, I mean it on a population level.

Sure. So, and that's another important thing. I think this article like really kind of hints at is that all of this stuff is on, and the article points out, all of this stuff's on a continuum. So it's not like everybody's brain at age 20 is at the same place.

Absolutely, yeah. And I think that's an important piece of the article too. We're talking about like population level decisions that you make from a policy standpoint. I guess that's kind of what I was driving at too. So when you look at like from a population level, one of the best pieces of information you would have about something like a 16 year old would be like,

how much does it cost to insure them? Because actuaries are crunching numbers and deciding these people are more dangerous. They crash cars more often. And then, you know, your insurance goes way down at about 25 if you're a dude. It goes way down earlier if you're a woman, if you're a girl. Yeah. Because they've crunched the numbers and they figured out when you stop doing stupid shit behind the wheel.

Sure, yeah. And so, like, part of me thinks that, like, not part of me,, like I think that the science should inform the population level decision making, realizing that you're going to license people. You're not going to license people that are perfectly capable. And you're also going to sometimes license people that are totally incapable. But you've got to make a decision that's demographically based, you know, in the population level, even though it might not work down to the individual. So you probably were absolutely capable of driving. but like your buddy that crashed his Mustang. Yeah. How old is he? Uh, we were 19 at the time. Okay. So you're older. Yeah. Okay. I thought maybe you were younger. No, we were 19 at the, but that's still young. It is. Yeah. It's under 25. Like you just said,

right. Right. It's under the age. It's in that dumb ass zone. It's under the age in which you, you are able to make, you know, positive, like well-informed decisions about, you know, what you're going to do. You know, I still make hotheaded decisions when I'm driving too. If somebody like cuts me off or something, I might be like really angry about it, you know, and like, you know, maybe get closer than I should to somebody like that. Um, I know that I still do that. I try to stop myself from doing it. Cause I'm like, that's fucking stupid. Just stop it. But there's a part of me that's very angry about some dumb person who did some dumb thing. And so even at my advanced age, I make bad decisions. You know what I mean? And I could sort of see that easily playing out with somebody else who's much younger

than me. Because I know, again, when I was younger, you know, I made, I think poorer decisions as a younger person. I think I very much made poorer, poorer decisions as a younger person. I also didn't have as much, I also recognize as a younger person, I didn't have as much, uh, care or, or, or thought process behind my wellbeing. Yeah. Right. I made a lot of decisions that probably could have hurt me that I wouldn't make now. Yeah, I definitely did as a young person. And even worse, I had almost no worry about strangers' well-being. A stranger's well-being for me as a young person at 16 or 17, a total stranger's well-being was something that never entered my mind. You know, I would worry about like myself or a friend, but the idea of like a straight, like that is just like, I just wasn't there.

My thinking wasn't there. Yeah. I, uh, I wonder too, you know, I was thinking about this article and thinking about the different cutoffs for things. One of the things, a couple of things that they talk about that I really liked that he talked about was he talked about kids. Because one of the bad things about lowering our vengeance on younger people is the kickback is sometimes judges will say, well, if we're going to lower the age for

this, you know, may raise the age for, you know, whether or not someone can have life without parole, we certainly shouldn't allow that person to have an abortion because they can't make the decision to make that abortion. They can't make these decisions to, um, to decide to have puberty blockers. They also can't make decisions to decide what their pronouns are or something like that, right? And in the article, they take great pains to talk about while decision-making about having an abortion, you know, clearly you have plenty of time to do that. And in many places in the country, it's enforced time to make that decision. There's also, you know, they have plenty of time to make that decision. So we shouldn't even consider that when

we talk about whether or not they should be making that decision at that age. But then they also go to great pains to mention that these are things that are like anti-trans groups are using because they want to try to latch onto this. They aren't using the science in this case. What they're doing is they're latching onto this so that they can oppress people. Yeah. Well, it's the difference. Again, it comes back to, are people in the heat of the moment? If you're in the heat of the moment and you're a young person, your decision-making is compromised. We know that scientifically you're heat of the moment, but you know, these are not heat of the moment. Those other decisions are not heat of the moment

decisions. So this science has no impact on that and really shouldn't be considered. And you're right. One of the problems with science when it intersects with policy is that science is sort of like statistics. Like you can kind of wriggle it around and make it read however you want it to read, depending on what your viewpoint is or your agenda happens to be. And so it's a tough spot because you want science to influence our politics. We want science to influence policy.

We want science to influence the law. We need it to. We have to have that because we're learning new things about the world and it should inform the way that we interact with one another and behave with one another and institute policies for our well-being and our cultural advancement. So science has to do that work and has to be part of that process. But it is absolutely a double-edged sword because bad actors and not even always bad actors, also just people aren't really well educated on science.

So how a lot of people, and I'll raise my hand, up until I read this article, I thought the 25 myth because I don't read scientific journals. I read news articles and papers about things. So it's like, here's the science, then there's a journalist, then there's me. And so I'm fucking two fucking telephones away from the actual research. And so most of us are like that.

And the thing is, even if you're in the sciences, if it's not your science, you're a game of telephone away too, man. If you're a molecular biologist and you're reading about a new physics development, like you're better equipped to do it than I am, but that's not your field. Sure. Yeah. That's just not your field. They don't interrelate. Yeah. So that's a tough spot as science becomes more like, as science becomes less accessible to the every man, we misunderstand its implications. It's like a sous chef having to fill in for patisserie for the evening. It's like, you can do it. You can probably do it, but you're going to do

some simple shit tonight. Right, yeah. You're not going to do, you're certainly not going to do the fucking croquembouche or whatever. You're going to do something a lot less,

a lot less Bernie or whatever. So yeah, it totally makes sense. I, and you know, but there, but even still,

and I know you said there might not be bad actors, but there definitely are bad actors that will go out of their way to find and twist these things so that they can bring these things up and say, see, they did this here and they're inconsistent because they want to do this. And you're like, yeah, but you're inconsistent because you want that kid to stay in prison forever. And you don't want to let these people have this decision. You want to have your cake and eat it too. I want no one to have cakes.

Except for in their case, they're not using any science to back it up. Right. Right. So what they're saying is that decisions are these weird, crazy things that are fluctuating that no one can really understand. Yeah.

Whereas the other groups of neuroscientists are saying, no, we can't understand how decision-making works. It just turns out that in this case, where you want to punish the person, you're wrong. And in this other case, where you want to punish the person, you're also wrong. Yeah, and it's tough because I think it's one of those spots

where nuance is required. Yeah. And we're just bad at it. We are bad at it. And especially nuance when it interacts with law. Yeah. And we're just bad at it. We are bad at it. And like, and especially nuance when it interacts with law. Yeah. Because like we were talking about before, law is a series of rubrics and decisions. Right.

Well, it doesn't take into account for a lot of this nuance. You know, it's like, did A occur? If A occurred, then B is the result. You're just like, all right, but that skips all the context. I know it's more complicated than that. But I mean, law is really about making decisions and about running things through this sort of very strict rubric.

And science is a little squishier than that, especially as it gets more complicated. I worry that something like this could easily get thrown up to the Supreme Court and get overturned by our absolutely ass backwards group of fucking knuckleheads that's in there. This article made it seem like these people that were on this court really did thoughtfully think about this. And even in the dissent, they had some thoughtful things to say.

But when you really think about this getting kicked up to the big court, I mean, the, the, the big court just recently with the abortion ruling was like, well, they didn't mention abortion. Yeah. I mean,

seriously, what else can you just use that? That's, that is absolutely the lamest argument in the history of arguments. And so if you can use that on anything, you could use that on, on this, especially, especially man. Yeah. Especially. And, and the courts and some on anything, you could use that on this especially.

Especially, man. Yeah, especially. And the courts and some of the people they interview in the courts, I think they go through great pains too to acknowledge that, yeah, maybe we want to push things out to 25, but no one will buy it. So we're going to try for 21. So even people, and we're talking to some of the scientists involved too, that were making recommendations and filing their amicus briefs. They were basically like, look, I'm not going to write down 25 or 24. Even though 25 feels like the right number, we were just at 17 two years ago. Right.

And I can't go to them and say, yeah, what about 25? Because that feels like too long a time. Yeah. yeah, what about 25? Because that feels like too long a time. You've got to have these baby steps in between. And the baby steps are still against what would be scientifically the most rigorous way to do this. And that's, I think, a really interesting part of this too.

I really did enjoy this quite a bit because it did change my thinking too, because I also, in the same way, have always been thinking this 25 thing is the thing. And you know, like as you work your way up, they say that the reason why that got blown out of proportion in the article is because it was just like mistranslated a bunch of times.

Like you said, read by people who don't understand it completely. And what happened is, is it just got, it got essentially turned into a game of telephone all over, you know, everywhere. And even you've heard about it. I've heard about it. And, and, and so really, uh, really interesting way to think about this in a, is a continuum. And as you know, we can't, you can't always just have that hard rule on everything. You've got to be like, okay, maybe it's 17 for tattoos. Maybe it's

20 for driving. Maybe it's 20 for driving. Maybe it's, you know. And so there might just be different times that you're an adult differently. Yeah. Well, and it's like, what are the consequences of the decision that we're thinking about making? That's another important piece too. Like if I'm getting a tattoo, am I getting it on my face? Yeah.

You know? Yeah. That's different. Because it? Yeah. You know? Yeah. That's different. Because it just is. It's just different. If I'm going to get a tattoo on my fucking face versus my arm. Yeah. There's a big difference.

Right. You know, if some 17-year-old wants to get a tattoo on their arm, like, the consequences, like, I'm sort of like, all right, well, you want to get it on your face? I don't know, man. Maybe you should be a little older. Yeah. Maybe you should. We should think about the consequences of the decisions that we're thinking about

what adulthood means. Because, you know, like 18, can I buy a car? Yeah, okay, you're not going to be pressed into buying a car. If something goes wrong, you'll have financial consequences, you know. But like 18, should I buy a gun? No. you'll have financial consequences you know but like 18 should i buy a gun no yeah i go back to my original reject the premise where i'm like maybe we shouldn't have guns yeah i don't know you know what i mean yeah maybe we shouldn't and i'll be honest i think i think you

know in our country the uh age to own a gun is so is i don't think, I think it's like fucking out of the womb. You can be, I have a six shooter if your dad bought it for you. You can get gifted long guns. A gun at a very young age, very young age. But you know, I don't know what those ages are and I don't know what those limits are,

but at a very young age, I mean, younger than fucking Ralphie shooting a fucking BB gun in Christmas story, like younger than that. So we allow for those sorts of things. But you know, when you think about it in the sense of buying a gun or buying, you know, even buying like a handgun,

right. Should you be able to buy like a fucking bolt action gun to go hunting with if you're 18? I don't know. Is that different than buying a, you know, a, a, a fucking, a Glock, a nine that has like a 15 cartridge or 20 cartridge magazine or something like that? Yeah. Or one of these like faux submachine guns that use pistol ammo? Have you seen these? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a semi-automatic

that you hold it like a submachine gun and you can just run through pistol ammo in it. Like crazy. And, you know, it's as fast as you can pull the trigger. Yep. And it has more, it's not as long gun, but it's certainly

more concealable and you can just hold it and just go into a place and just fire randomly and probably hit a bunch of stuff. That's insanity to me. That's insanity

that anybody... If you hand that off to a kid, you know, that is, you know, just out of high school or still in high school, that's insane to me.

You know, like I say, there's a lot of this article where I'm just like, man, I don't think we should be doing that at all. I know. Right. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. That's going to wrap it up for this week. This week's long form show. Be sure to check us out Monday. We'll have a full show and we'll be back with a goofy episode in a couple of weeks. But we're going to leave you like we always do with Skeptic's Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit.

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