Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Why Half of Life is a Total Mystery & How The News Affects Us

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, why do some men act foolish in front of beautiful women? Then the hidden forces that influence every aspect of your life. Think about it. Why do some medicines work for some people but not others? Why does one smoker die young and another lives to 100? There's a difference that we cannot track down,

Starting point is 00:00:52 we cannot fully explain, but it's there and it's powerful and anybody who doesn't talk about it is misleading you about a fundamental aspect of the way that things work. Then, how chocolate is responsible for the microwave oven and just how important is the news to the average person. Do people really care about the news? If you ask people why do you watch the news or why

Starting point is 00:01:15 do you read the news the number one answer you get is for the weather. People aren't so much in it for you know stories about politics or buildings burning down or all that kind of thing. They're watching it for the weather. All this today on Something You Should Know. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com

Starting point is 00:01:56 to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. Something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to our Saturday episode of Something You Should Know. And here is something you don't really talk about much, but I'm sure you've witnessed this or maybe even been part of this, and that's that some men sometimes will act foolish in front of a pretty woman. It's also true that men are more likely to act reckless and are more accident-prone in front of a beautiful woman. In a study, male skateboarders were observed by other males. Then those same skateboarders were observed by attractive females.

Starting point is 00:02:52 When the skateboarders knew they were being watched by the females, they took more chances, they did riskier moves, and they had more accidents. So why is that? Well, the answer is testosterone. The researchers tested the skateboarder's saliva and found an increase in testosterone levels when they knew the pretty women were watching. The assumption is that this is a remnant of our evolution, that centuries ago this type of behavior was basically a hormonally-fueled advertisement of health and vigor aimed at potential female mates. And that signal of strength, fitness, and daring were

Starting point is 00:03:32 intended to intimidate potential rivals. Men are still programmed to do this, even though it doesn't always make much sense. And that is something you should know. We all like to believe we understand much of how and why the world works. After all, we have experts and scientists and researchers who supposedly can tell us how and why things work. So what if I told you that a lot of how the world works, no one has a clue? Things you would think are explainable are not, at least according to the knowledge and understanding we currently have. Michael Blastland is a writer and broadcaster in the UK, and he's author of a book called The Hidden Half, How the World Conceals Its Secrets. Hi, Michael.

Starting point is 00:04:27 So explain what you mean about how so much of the world can't be explained. Can I tell you a story? I love stories. I'm going to take you to an aquarium in Germany in the 1990s. One of the creatures they keep is a crayfish. They're in a tank, and one of these crayfish lays offspring without any contact with a male. And all the offspring are female. And there are no males involved. In fact, one of the first things people say is, where are the males? What's going on? Well, what had happened is that it was cloning itself. There were no males involved.

Starting point is 00:05:02 When the scientists got hold of these creatures, because they were fascinated, they realized that they could isolate causation, because everything's the same. Nothing ever changes there. Then anything that happens in these creatures which is different must be to do with their environment. Because that's the only other thing, right? You either have genes or you have environment. You either have nature or you have nurture, the kind of things that influence us as we're growing, as we're behaving, going about our normal way of life. But they went a step further. They put these crayfish into identical environments as well. So now you have creatures which are genetically the same and they're environmentally the same. So let me make sure I understand this. So you've got a crayfish that reproduces by cloning itself.

Starting point is 00:05:48 So a clone of itself would be genetically the same. And then these offspring, these cloned offspring, are kept in exactly the same environments. At least as near as any human can make them. Right down to the same technician examining them. They had the same environments. At least as near as any human can make them, right down to the same technician examining on them. They had the same temperature water. They were fed to excess. There was no competition for food. Quite often they were reared separately.

Starting point is 00:06:14 So there was not even any interaction to affect the way that they developed. So what are they like, these creatures? Because we've held constant the two causes of everything, genetics and environment, in the development of an animal. And they are the same. But the creatures themselves, one of them is 20 times the weight of another.

Starting point is 00:06:41 Every single creature has a different pattern on its carapace, on its shell. They are behaviorally different. Some of them like a crowd. Some of them are loners. Some are behaviorally different. Some of them like a crowd, some of them are loners, some of them are dominant, some of them are submissive. They lay their eggs at different points in their lives. They have a different lifespan by a factor of three. The differences just go on and on and on. And you say, okay, we've explained everything, but there's something else. There's something else. There's some other factor. And people have wrestled for a term to describe what this third factor they sometimes call it. Intangible variation is another word people have come up with. Incidentally, the power of the effect that we're describing is equal

Starting point is 00:07:15 to the other two factors combined. In many cases, it's equal to genetics and environment combined. So that's pretty interesting. If you control for environment and you control for genetics, so everything should stay the same and yet it doesn't, I wonder what that other thing is then. What is that other thing that is such a powerful force that causes all these differences in all these baby crayfish. Somehow we have to explain those crayfish. Somehow we have to explain the fact that identical twins, even conjoined twins, are different, often fundamentally different. Even when they're brought up in the same circumstances and they have the same genes, we have to explain somehow the fact that if you have

Starting point is 00:08:05 breast cancer in one breast, the other breast is no more likely to get it than the breast of a stranger. This is accepting the BRCA genes. But if you put those to one side for a moment, two breasts in one person, one of them can be more like a stranger than it can to its own twin. And that's a case where you really have explained absolutely everything about them, because they are the same as far as anything can be the same. They're the same person. And yet there is this difference. There is a difference that we cannot track down, we cannot fully explain. But it's there, and it's powerful. And anybody who doesn't talk about it doesn't talk about the chance and the luck and the randomness and the hidden factors, the intangible variations is misleading you about a fundamental aspect of

Starting point is 00:08:50 the way that things work. And so what does that mean that we can't explain it? So we just don't have the knowledge to explain it or it's something mystical and magical. And so what if we can't explain it? The so what is that if you want to work out how to change things in life, you need to understand the causes. If you think you're going to be able to develop personalized medicine on the basis of people's genetics, you have to understand how often that just isn't going to work because there are other factors at play. And this extends well beyond biology, by the way.

Starting point is 00:09:22 The real so what, I'll give you one more general problem, is that science at the moment has what some critics call a replication crisis. They are trying to redo experiments, experiments where they think they've derived authoritative knowledge. And they are finding that when they try and do those experiments again, when they try to replicate them, they're not getting the same results. In fact, they're getting completely different results in many cases. And they're having to conclude that those findings, those original pieces happening is that they have been unable in their experimental

Starting point is 00:10:05 setup to account for all these intangible variations, one of which may have produced their results. So I get it that there are these intangible things going on that nobody can explain that changes the results of scientific experiments and whatnot. Why can't we just call that randomness, chance, who knows what? Nothing at all. You can call it chance if you like. You can say there's a chance factor,

Starting point is 00:10:39 and people do say there's an element of luck in things. My quarrel is with the element, because I think that's a kind of slight tendency to dismiss it, to feel that, well, broadly, we do understand things. We, to a massive degree of probability, you know, we've got 90% of it nailed down. There's a few bits around the edges maybe that might throw us out here and there. That's my quarrel. It's with this notion that chance is just like ripples on the surface of a lake, which is otherwise vast and still and understood. It's more like somebody throwing a tractor into that lake.

Starting point is 00:11:15 So this actually is starting to sound a little scary because it's like we're deluding ourselves, right? I mean, we like to think we know pretty much how everything works. Yeah, there's some things that are a bit of a mystery, but we've got a handle on most of it. And you're saying we don't have a handle on maybe half of it. And that's just a little frightening because I would like to think, I think most people would like to think that we do know more than apparently we do. So give the example, talk about the example of medicines sold in the US, because I think this really drives your point home. Okay, let's take the top 10 medicines for sale in the US. How well do they work? How often

Starting point is 00:12:00 would you expect those medicines to work? Nine times out of 10? Maybe 50-50? Okay, if I take the top 10 sellers, the best of them, according to one analysis, can be expected to work about one time in four. The worst of them, this is the top 10, about one time in 25. In other words, there's a massive hit and miss problem with things that we think we can depend on.

Starting point is 00:12:27 And the misses are an enormously larger proportion than I think most people appreciate. Yeah, that's a great example. And so what are those medications, do you know, off the top of your head? They're medications for asthma, skin conditions, medications for pain. I can't recall the brand names, I'm afraid. I can't tell you. The puzzle here is that these things work in the sense that if you took two huge groups of people and you give them to one group, but not to the other group, the group that gets them, they're going to do better overall. These things do work. They've been tested,

Starting point is 00:13:02 they've been through the regulators. But what does work mean? Work just doesn't mean the kind of reliability, I think, the regularity that people expect. We're talking about the hidden uncertainties of life. My guest is Michael Blastland. He is a writer and broadcaster and author of the book, The Hidden Half, How the World Conceals Its Secrets. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit FlyPorter.com and actually enjoy economy.

Starting point is 00:13:55 Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation.

Starting point is 00:14:30 And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Michael, in talking about how sometimes medications work, sometimes they don't work.

Starting point is 00:15:12 They work on some people, they don't work on other people. But that's kind of how life works, and we've talked about it on this podcast before. If I look back on major changes and events in my life. They're often because I met a guy who knew another guy, who introduced me to another guy, or something happened, or I read this article. It's all unexplainable. It just happens, and that's just how life works. And couldn't that be just what happens in those crayfish

Starting point is 00:15:43 down to the cellular level where one cell in one crayfish bumps into another cell and that causes something else and it's all chance and luck. And that's why this crayfish is three times bigger than that crayfish. Yeah, I think something like that in a subcellular way is probably going on. And ain't it the way, you know, everybody has a story to tell about, well, yeah, sure, I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, maybe, and everything looked bad for me. If history is destiny, as people say, then I was doomed. You know, no chance. But then, this day, I met somebody, I met a guy. I met a woman. You know, somebody said something to me. These words, these few words made a difference. And when you study criminal behavior, the weird thing is that you find actually that we do have some explanations for how people get into crime.

Starting point is 00:16:40 But there have been very, very big studies, a lifetime study following people for something like 40, 50, 70 years to see how they get out of crime. And they cannot find consistent explanations. But what they can find is a chance conversation, an influence, an experience not looked for, out of the blue, something which just switches the life course just like that. And at a subcellular level, I think something like that is going on with the crayfish and others. We're basically seeing, think of the genes as the recipe for human life. But when you bake that life, you bake it just a little differently. Someone interrupts you when you put in the salt. You spill the flour, you don't add quite so much. Every time the loaf is that little bit different. And, you know, it could be that there's some kind of influence like that, almost like a biography.

Starting point is 00:17:37 Something comes along, some chance influence, which just changes entirely the way the thing turns out in the end. Well, that example about the medication is so interesting because that is one area where people really do believe that, you know, if you take this pill, it's going to help. And maybe believing it's going to help helps a little too. But often doctors do say, and if this doesn't work, we'll try something else. I mean, there is some admission that not everything works for everybody. But I think it works, as you're saying, a lot less than people think it does. And so what do we do with that?

Starting point is 00:18:15 We don't throw out all the medication because it doesn't work for everybody. It still works for the people it works for. Sometimes it works for you sometimes, but not other times. That's one of the things that we don't actually know about the information on how well things work. We don't know if we're just measuring whether it works in you every time reliably, or whether it works sometimes, but not others. Maybe because you're taking some interfering medicine, or you're stressed, or there's something else going on in your life, which means that medicine just isn't as effective as it might be on a better occasion. Yeah, these things work, but that's consistent with them almost never working. And our uncertainty about when they

Starting point is 00:18:57 work, I think, has to be a factor in the way that we manage our treatment. We have to be prepared to say, as doctors do, I agree with you, sometimes they'll say, let's give it a try. Where else in life does this happen? I mean, the medication thing is just so perfect. It illustrates the problem exactly right. But where else do we see this? How about an example from COVID? Because we're all anxious about COVID right now.

Starting point is 00:19:20 Trying to work out the causes of COVID. Why have some countries done so well and some other countries done so badly? I'm going to take you back very briefly to the 1920s when there was a fashion for what's called experimental epidemiology. Basically, they used to try to run epidemics in a lab in mice. Now, I know mice are different, but even so, you'd have thought they'd have learned something. And in a way, they did. So what they do is they take thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of mice, and they bury things because they can. They're in a lab. They try and change their diet. They try to change the population density. They do, and they can do these things one by one. Then they say, okay, what makes the difference? What changes the way an epidemic turns out?

Starting point is 00:20:05 They couldn't find anything. They did this over a period of 20 years. They did it in the United States. They did it in the United Kingdom. A couple of guys, Greenwood and Topley, sound like a firm of Victorian solicitors. But they were rigorous in their experiments. And they went on and on with this kind of work, very methodical. They could not predict the outcomes. Now, I think

Starting point is 00:20:26 that's quite a humbling lesson, the fact that you can have as much rigor and as much control as you want in an experimental setup, and you still cannot identify. You can take two groups and you can say this group of mice is identical to that one, and yet one of them would have 70% typhoid and the other would have 10. And they were unable to explain any reason why. So that's one example, I think. That's a topical example where we're all happily spinning out explanations. And don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to deny that there are any explanations at all.

Starting point is 00:21:02 I'm not trying to claim that everything is random. I believe there have been real mistakes in the management of COVID. But I'm just trying to bring us down to earth a little bit before we shoot our mouths off. I don't want to use that phrase, but you know, it's the one that springs to mind before we begin kind of firing out explanations. Because those explanations are a lot harder to come by reliably than i think we suspect are there things in life are there areas of of human existence unrelated to medicine that this plays out how about economics perfect so we do we we take something like uh gdp we're all interested in how fast the economy is growing it's the basic way that we all get wealthier. We become more productive, we make more stuff. How accurate is GDP? Well, I think we kind of know that there's some uncertainty around this. But let me give you a sense of that uncertainty.

Starting point is 00:21:56 GDP in the United Kingdom grows from three months to the next three months, quarter on quarter by about 0.3, 0.4. The United States is something similar. You round it all up for a whole year's worth of effect, but we do it quarter by quarter. 0.3 or 0.4. Our statistical authority has just last year, for the first time anywhere in any statistical authority that I'm aware of, decided to put some uncertainty around that estimate. So it says we think the economy grew by 0.3, but there's a margin of error. How big is that margin of error? The margin of error itself is 0.4 for the latest estimates. Now that means if you take 0.3 growth, that it could be minus 0.1, or it could be 0.7. 0.7 is virtually a boom. Minus 0.1 is

Starting point is 00:22:48 on the way to a recession. And it appears that we cannot tell the difference. Now, just take a moment to absorb that. We cannot tell the difference at first blush between a boom and a potential recession. And you look at all the people telling you things in the press, all the analysis, all the political comment, this is a disaster. Oh, everything's fine. You know, oh, we're roaring now, you know, well, there's an enormous margin of uncertainty in those initial numbers. They get better as time goes on, because we get more data, we refine our estimates, and so on. But just again, just to bring us down a little ways, just to inject a little more humility and uncertainty into the information that we have, that we think we have. And so life is uncertain.

Starting point is 00:23:35 Everything you're saying is support for the notion that life is uncertain. People have experienced the fact that life is uncertain. So is what you're saying good news or bad news? Clearly, if you're going in for an operation, you want to know whether it works. There's no benefit really to uncertainty in that case. But if you're running a business, how do you think one business does better than another? There has to be some uncertainty. If everything were calculus, you know, it was simple, a calculus of probabilities, everybody would take the same business decision. There'd be no great winners.

Starting point is 00:24:09 There'd be no losers. How would you like it if I told you the way all the films end? I mean, we can do that for you. You know, we can sort that. I can tell you before you sit down and watch them. You really want to remove all the uncertainty? Do you want to know the time and manner of your death? Do you want to know what all your manner of your death? Do you want to

Starting point is 00:24:25 know what all your Christmas presents are going to be forevermore? You know, it could be arranged. You know, there are areas of life where actually uncertainty is life. You know, do you want to know which date you're going to find the true love of your life? Do you know, it's not this one, you're wasting your time. Not that one either. It's going to be on a Monday, the 17th of June, by the way. Do you really want to know that? Or do you want the adventure and the unknown and the uncertainties? There is an extent to it. There's a degree to which I think uncertainty is life. Uncertainty is what makes life interesting. Now, I go too far with this. I don't want to try and pretend that there are times when we wouldn't really want to know, and it would be better if we could manage the economy better.

Starting point is 00:25:12 It would be better if we could manage our diseases better. But there are some areas which I think we can't remove, and some areas which I just wouldn't want you to remove. Bits of uncertainty, I want lots of it in my life, you know, and I hope I can persuade you that you should want some in yours. Well, yeah, you're right. I mean, if life was certain, if we knew what was going to happen beforehand in every aspect of life, life would be pretty boring.

Starting point is 00:25:38 On the other hand, there are plenty of things in life that I think we wish we had more certainty and we clearly don't, even though we might delude ourselves into thinking that. And I guess that's life. Michael Blastland has been my guest. He is a writer and broadcaster in England, and he is author of a book called The Hidden Half, How the World Conceals Its Secrets. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you for being here, Michael. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Starting point is 00:26:13 People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson,

Starting point is 00:26:52 discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover.

Starting point is 00:27:27 We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Just how important is the news to you? Do you watch a lot of news on TV? Or maybe you get your news online.

Starting point is 00:27:52 Maybe you still get a newspaper. Do you think news organizations do a good job of reporting the news? How much does the news of the day actually impact your life? Probably not as much as the people who create the news would like you to believe. Rob Brotherton is a psychology and science writer who researches and teaches political psychology at Barnard College in New York, and he's author of a book called Bad News. Rob has some great insight into just how the news of the day does impact you and what you may not know about the news you see. Hi, Rob. So I've always thought of the news, reporting the

Starting point is 00:28:34 news, whether it's online or TV or in a newspaper, that that whole process of reporting the news is a fairly modern invention, but actually it goes back quite a ways, right? The publication of daily or weekly news in the form of newspapers, that goes back to about the 1600s. And in fact, news flourished as a business. It absolutely took off pretty quickly in a big way. Consumers really responded to it. And so for centuries now, there has been a very active news industry. Consumers have had a lot of choice of where to go for their news, what kind of news they want to consume. So it's tempting always to think that we're facing new, unprecedented problems, that things

Starting point is 00:29:17 are different than ever before. But in a lot of ways, the issues that we're dealing with now are the issues that we've been dealing with with news all along. And as much as people consume the news, people criticize the news, that it's one-sided or that there's too much fake news or it's too trivial or it doesn't cover the important news of the day in depth enough, all those things. Now, this has been the complaint since people started publishing news. And so, you know, you hear about fake news today and the problems that it's causing us. And that's not to say that there aren't problems currently, but that in a lot of ways, they're not new, that we've always been dealing with some of these inherent problems of news. Like, you know,

Starting point is 00:30:01 what is news? What's the definition of newsworthiness? And not everybody's going to agree on that. What's the criteria for truth and accuracy in the news? Because there's a lot of information out there. We're not going to get everything right all the time. So there's always been this balance, this tension between wanting to get information out there and wanting to commoditize it, wanting to monetize it on the one hand, and also wanting to do information out there and wanting to commoditize it, wanting to monetize it, on the one hand, and also wanting to do a public service and to inform the public, on the other hand. Talk about what seems obvious to me, and I think a lot of other people, is the news of any given day tends to be very negative. You know, this has become a cliche for a long time now,

Starting point is 00:30:44 that if it bleeds, it leads. You know, the news is all bad for a long time now that if it bleeds, it leads, you know, the news is all bad. So why do we like that? What's so appealing about bad news? And there are a few reasons for this. One reason people have suggested is that journalists, the people producing the news are all like cynical misanthropes, basically, who just like to cast aspersions on other people and to point out the bad things in life. But I don't think that's an entire explanation. And psychologically, we are, we have what's called a negativity bias. We're drawn towards bad information, negative information. You know, just think about people slowing down to look at a car crash. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It makes sense for us to be drawn to

Starting point is 00:31:25 bad information. In our evolutionary history, bad information would have been of great importance. If somebody told you, you know, a mob's coming to ransack the village, then that's important to know. You can act on that right away. But as so many things have changed over the course of the last centuries and millennia, we're exposed to vastly more information than we used to. And not all of that information is going to be as consequential. That doesn't mean our brains have changed. We're still wired in a lot of ways to respond to information in certain ways. And news primarily takes advantage of that. Well, it does seem to be human nature, or at least it's my nature. I like

Starting point is 00:32:06 to feel like I know what's going on. I like to feel like I'm sort of up to date. And I imagine that that's a feeling that a lot of people have. We don't want to be kept in the dark. And I think anybody that's like gone on vacation where they don't watch TV or they don't get the paper or whatever their news source is, that flow is interrupted, they feel a little out of touch. Yeah, absolutely. This is another kind of crucial aspect of our psychology that the news leverages, which is that we don't want to be out of the loop. If something happens, we want to know about it.

Starting point is 00:32:40 And this gets to the functions of the news in general. There's more than one function. There's the function of being informed, of knowing what's happening. Another function is just getting along with other people, to have something to talk about, and again, to not feel out of the loop like other people know Channel first started, and I remember thinking, well, that is the dumbest idea. Who is going to sit there for any length of time and watch the weather? And people love the weather. People watch the Weather Channel. And I thought, well, that's sort of like, you know, keeping up. You look to see what the weather's like in your old hometown. You look to see what the weather's like tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:33:24 And it all seems to play into that, I want to know what's going on. Yeah, in fact, the weather, if you ask people, why do you watch the news or why do you read the news? The number one answer you get is for the weather. So people aren't even so much in it for, you know, stories about politics or buildings burning down or all that kind of thing. You're watching it for the weather in large part. And that makes perfect sense from the point of view of the information function of news. You know, it's useful to know what the weather is going to be tomorrow so you can plan, do you need your coat and your umbrella or not? But again, that's not the only function. And another thing that's interesting about the weather, I think, is how much people like to complain about weather forecasting.

Starting point is 00:34:06 So one of the main reasons people watch the news is to see the weather forecast. But then, you know, how often do you hear people complain? They never get it right. And so, again, we have this tension of wanting information, but also wanting it to serve a function of allowing us to engage with one another, even if that's just kind of heaping a scorn on the accuracy of weather forecasting. Because there are now so many different news sources, how much does it happen where people get their news from a news organization that aligns with their political beliefs? So if you're conservative, you get your news over here. If you're a liberal, you get your news over here because they present the news in alignment with how you think. Yeah, so this gets to the idea of echo chambers and filter bubbles. Are we each living in our own cloistered reality and not seeing the same world as people on

Starting point is 00:34:58 the other side? And, you know, it seems so plausible, but in fact, the research shows that this idea might be somewhat overblown. So most people don't care that much about the news, for one thing. They don't watch that much news. It's not what they're looking for in life. You know, when they're watching the TV or scrolling on the Internet, it's usually looking for entertainment, not news, which is one reason why we're not all in these hyper-partisan filter bubbles, just that most people don't care that much. And when most people do look for news, they're looking in these kind of large centrist sources. So the network, the nightly news shows, or big news

Starting point is 00:35:38 aggregators like Google News or whatever, most people aren't looking for the hyper-partisan, hyper-political news. That seems to be, people who do, they are the outliers. That's not the biggest story about us as news consumers. But one of the complaints you hear about news and fake news is that it is filtered through political views and that what you're calling news, you know, is not what I would call news, that you're seeing the same thing and putting a spin on it that I'm not. And people complain about that all the time. Yeah. And this, I think, gets to an even deeper psychological question of how do we determine what's true and what's false or what's fact and what's opinion. And so there's some research into

Starting point is 00:36:26 this question suggesting that, yeah, like you're saying, when we think something is true, when we have pre-existing beliefs, then we tend to agree with whatever we can find that supports that. And we'll say, yeah, these are good quality facts. Anything that goes against us, we're slightly more likely to say, well, that's not exactly a fact. That's more of like an opinion or that's biased or that's just wrong. And so to an extent, yeah, we're all filtering the world through our own pre-existing beliefs and perceptions. But, you know, that's always been a part of our psychology. We don't need algorithms and filter bubbles to do that for us. That's something that we're pretty good at on our own. And in fact, the research suggests that if anything,

Starting point is 00:37:07 people getting information, getting news online, where there's more information available than ever before, it's actually good for how much diversity in terms of viewpoints that they're receiving. Because people read more news across the spectrum when more news is available to them. When I worked in the radio business, I reported the news, and it became clear to me that facts are facts,

Starting point is 00:37:31 and you want to report the news objectively, but there are constraints. Newspapers have space constraints. TV and radio have time constraints. And at the end of the day, what you hear or what you see is really filtered through whoever wrote it. And it may not be intentional. It may just be you had to edit the story for time reasons. And so something got left out. But leaving out part of the story changes the story. And at the end of the day, it really is the version of the story from the person who wrote it. And this journalist said, if we were being honest, we would say, well, it's not all the news that's fit to print. It's some of the goings on that happened to come across our desk in the last 24 hours and that we had room to fit in the paper and that we could fit into a typical kind of story structure style. And all these issues that go into producing the news that comes out every day, we tend, I think, at least I did as a naive consumer, I used to think like, what's in the newspaper or what's on the news website, whatever, that is the news. That's the most important stuff of the day. But in fact,

Starting point is 00:38:55 as you're pointing out, there are all these issues that go into the production of that, which can shape how it comes out in the end. And I think as consumers of news, it would be useful for us to be more aware of that. A common criticism of news is that today it is presented in a very partisan way by some. And I wonder, is that a relatively new criticism or not? There used to be hyper-partisan news. That used to be the norm. And newspaper editors, you know, on the front page, the editor would write a letter saying, my political rivals are all idiots and things to that effect, like slightly more politely and in, you know, 19th century florid language. But basically that was the norm. And in fact, in the history of New York City newspapers, where a lot of the daily newspapers first flourished in the 1820s, 1830s, some of the editors of those papers, they literally got into fistfights on the streets over their political differences.

Starting point is 00:39:56 Really? There were duels, there were fistfights. It's quite an entertaining period of history in that regard. But the point is, I think, there have been different norms in news production over time, even within the United States. It used to be the norm to be overtly political and partisan. Then as technology changed, as the business model changed somewhat in terms of news production, that became less preferable. And it became preferable to downplay your political allegiances and, in fact, to emphasize the objectivity of your news reporting.

Starting point is 00:40:35 And, you know, things might be changing somewhat again. There seems to be somewhat of a movement away from pledging objectivity, which, as an ideal, you can never live up to and in fact acknowledging again that we all have our own biases we all have our perspective even the producers of news but there have been journalists i'm thinking of you know walter cronkite who was the cbs anchor back in the 60s and 70s and and you know edward R. Murrow and these kind of legendary broadcast journalists who were considered very objective and very authoritative and trusted. Yeah, there's been, you know, a decline in trust in institutions across the board pretty much

Starting point is 00:41:18 over the last few decades. But speaking of Walter Cronkite, I mean, there is this sort of myth that he was the most trusted man in America. But it is a myth, basically. It was the product of a single survey asking people how much they trusted different figures. And they were mostly political figures, like senators and the president at the time. This was in the 1970s. And for one reason or another, they included Walter Cronkite as the only news anchor on that survey. And surprise, surprise, he came out above, you know, President Richard Nixon and some other senators at the time. But still, it's not that surprising, I think, that this like kindly seeming guy who you see on TV every night would come out ahead of these politicians in a survey of

Starting point is 00:42:01 popularity, basically. But I think it's an overstatement to say he was the most trusted man in America. Like I said, since the advent of news as a business, there have always been critics. There's always been this ambivalent relationship between the news and consumers. There does seem to be a distrust when new sources of news materialize. People say they can't be trusted. So when people started getting news from the Internet, you know, more traditional journalists were saying, well, you can't trust those as news sources because those aren't real journalists. But I imagine when TV and radio news came out, that newspaper journalists were saying,

Starting point is 00:42:42 well, you can't trust TV and radio because those people aren't real journalists. One of the stories that I discovered when I was researching this was the story of the War of the Worlds, Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which I'm sure many people are familiar with. It was on the radio here in the States in 1938, and it was framed, Orson Welles framed it as if it was a live breaking news broadcast of aliens invading the East Coast of the United States. And if you know anything about this, you probably know that there was mass panic. The newspaper headlines the next day declared that the nation had collectively lost its mind, that people were fleeing their homes,

Starting point is 00:43:21 and the highways were clogged, and one thing and another. And in fact, that's not true. That was fake news. So the New York Times, the front page of the New York Times saying national panic, it never happened. Almost every national and local newspaper the next day, they carried these headlines and they were all pretty much based on Associated Press bulletins that had been put out saying that people were panicking. There was very little fact-checking of the story, and so a lot of papers just credulously reported this thing.

Starting point is 00:43:52 And part of the explanation that people came up with for this event, this mass panic, which had not happened, people explained it as being the result of this new technology, the radio, that the radio can't be trusted, or people can't be trusted with the radio. You know, the Washington Post, the headline on page one coined this cute term, radiotic America, meaning that, you know, the radio was turning people into idiots or that idiots like to listen to the radio, if you prefer. But the point was that people were saying people can't be trusted with this new technology of the radio, you know, making information available to the whole nation at the same time. They can't be trusted. And so I think there are elements, recurrent elements of this kind of fear of technology, of new forms, new media that you can still see today. That is really interesting, because having been

Starting point is 00:44:47 a career broadcaster prior to this podcast, and being in the radio business, I have always believed that the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast caused a panic. Up until this very moment, I have always believed that. And you're saying it isn't true. Yeah, and it's entirely forgivable. I forgive you for believing that because it was on the front pages of all the newspapers the next day after the radio show. All the papers ran with this pretty much. There was almost no critical, skeptical coverage. And that's true up to the current day. The skeptical takes on this are beginning to filter down. But still, the main story, if you know anything about this, the story that you probably know is that there was mass panic. It's only through there's an

Starting point is 00:45:37 excellent book, a piece of research by a Princeton historian called A. Brad Schwartz. He wrote a wonderful book called Broadcast Hysteria where he actually went into the archives of the letters that people sent to Orson Welles and to CBS and to the FCC right after the radio show went out. Because if there was mass panic, that's where you should see it in the archives of people saying, I freaked out, why did you do that to me? And what this historian found was that there was almost none of that. There were a few people who were momentarily worried, but there's no evidence of mass panic to the extent nearly that was reported in all the newspapers. And so it shows the myth-making function that the news can, in some cases, serve.

Starting point is 00:46:22 When you watch TV news, or you look at the front page of the New York Times or any big newspaper, and the way it's presented is that this is really important. These are the most important things going on right now. But how do people look at it? Do people consume a lot of news and really take it to heart? So there's some research trying to look at news consumption habits. And if you want to look at active news consumers, then you find typically you have to start with a massive set of data and then discard almost everybody because they just aren't looking at news actively. And even with a quite a low bar, like say, you know, you read 10 news stories over the course of three months or so, then you have to point, what we're told is news is somebody's opinion of what is news. This criticism has been around since the advent of regularly published news.

Starting point is 00:47:37 So when newspapers started publishing like one issue a week and then one issue a day, people said, how is this not going to affect the definition of news? This necessarily is going to dilute it and trivialize it. If you have to fill a set number of pages every day in your newspaper, then they're going to be slow news days and you're going to have to put stuff in there that wouldn't otherwise be considered newsworthy. Or on the other hand, if something huge happens, then you have to condense it to fit it in your newspaper. And it levels all this information. It makes it seem all equally important when of course it isn't, it can't be. So what is your view? And maybe there's

Starting point is 00:48:19 research to back this up. Maybe there's not. But what is your view on just how important is news to people? And is it more important now than ever before or less important now than ever before? So I think overall, it's not that important, which might be disappointing for news junkies to hear or news producers. But for most people, most of the time, they're not looking for news. They don't care that much about it, and they'll come across it ambiently. They'll look up certain things that they particularly want to know, but it's not the main feature of most people's lives. Which I think is really the critical takeaway here, because it's very easy to watch the news and think that this is so important. But for a lot of people, it just isn't. And it's interesting to hear that insight.

Starting point is 00:49:10 Rob Brotherton has been my guest. He is a psychology and science writer. He teaches at Barnard College, and he's author of the book, Bad News. You'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Rob. Appreciate you being here. Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure.

Starting point is 00:49:29 We do love our chocolate. In fact, we spend $7 billion a year on it. Here are some facts about chocolate you might not be aware of. Chocolate is responsible for the microwave oven, sort of. After World War II, scientists were experimenting with microwave technology in the hopes of developing a better radar detector. One scientist named Percy Spencer got zapped with one of the devices and it melted the chocolate bar in his pocket.

Starting point is 00:49:59 So he then tried to pop some popcorn and cook an egg with the device. And it all worked. And there was the first microwave oven. There's absolutely no connection between chocolate and acne. That's a total myth. Chocolate is really good for you. It's the additives like sugar and butter that maybe aren't so good for you. But chocolate, pure cocoa powder, is full of iron and antioxidants.

Starting point is 00:50:24 Chocolate has very little caffeine. You'd have to eat about 10 candy bars to get the equivalent caffeine as in a single cup of coffee. Chocolate has over 500 flavor components. That's double the amount found in a strawberry and vanilla. And the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie sold the idea to Nestle Tollhouse in return for a lifetime supply of chocolate. And that is something you should know. It is always fun, helpful, and useful

Starting point is 00:50:58 to read the reviews people leave for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, Stitcher, wherever you listen. So take a moment and leave us a review. Hopefully five stars. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager,

Starting point is 00:51:31 but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook.

Starting point is 00:52:00 Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Why Half of Life is a Total Mystery & How The News Affects Us

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