The Science of Everything Podcast - Special Episode: History and Future of the Show

Episode Date: February 12, 2020

A special episode in which I discuss some of the ideas and principles behind the production of the show, sources I use for episodes, and my motivations for starting the podcast. I also talk about my own background and research interests, my thoughts about the relationship between science and philosophy, and some ideas for the future of the Science of Everything Podcast.

you're listening to a special episode of the Science of Everything podcast, and I'm your host, James Fodor. So in the previous episode 100, Unsolved Problems in Science, I promised that I would release a special episode, also as kind of a celebration of the 100th episode milestone, in which I talk a little bit about the past and future of the Science of Everything podcast. This is just a little bit of a bonus and a bit of little background information for those who might be interested. Feel free to skip if this isn't your thing. There'll be a new episode coming out soon. So a little bit about the history of the show, as you might be able to see looking back through the feed, I started the show back in 2010, which is a disturbingly long time ago now.

Actually, the original idea behind this podcast was that I was interested in science, and I listened to a variety of other science podcasts, but I had become slightly frustrated by a couple of things that I noticed. One was that a lot of science podcasts, at least then, I haven't followed so much lately, but I think it's probably still the same in that a lot of science podcasts focus on science news. Science news is not of great interest to me because a lot of new discoveries or papers that are released or press releases or whatever don't really describe very fundamental things. They describe just kind of incremental results, and often they don't hold up over time.

And I think science doesn't really advance by press releases. It advances sort of slowly and incrementally across a wide front. And so I don't think it really suits a new sort of format to really get a deep understanding of the discoveries and methods of science. So that frustrated me a little bit. The other thing that frustrated me about some of the science podcast was that I found that they were a bit waffly. There was a bit too much banter between hosts.

I mean, some is good, but, you know, there's a balance between content and banter and just kind of talking about irrelevant things, especially very topical things which date quite quickly. And that got a little bit old after a while. And so I decided that I wanted to start my own podcast as basically the podcast that I would like to exist, or that I would have liked someone else to make

in which I would focus on fundamental topics and discoveries and areas of science, covering natural science and social science, which was another thing, a lot of podcasts focus on one or the other. I see science as a continuum, so I wanted to include both, and discussing the sort of discoveries in a fairly sort of focused way without a lot of banter or news or other sort of fath. A few more pieces of information about the production of the show. So I don't script the show.

I think that's quite unusual for solo podcasts. Most podcasts that I've listened to are interview shows, or like groups of people talking to each other, or they're a single person reading off a script. Some people are able to read scripts in a fairly engaging way, although usually those podcasts are quite a lot shorter, so I'm quite proud of the fact that I'm able to deliver solo content of, I think, quite a high level of depth

and have quite lengthy shows. Of course, I don't release as often as I would like to, so there's a trade-off there. Each of the shows takes quite a few hours of preparation, and then I record it and then more hours of editing. As I said, I don't use the script. I've never done that, and it's a deliberate decision. I do have notes that I use to help remember what I want to discuss

and diagrams that I look at to remind myself of things as I'm talking, but I want it to sound more like a, not exactly a lecture, but a conversation, although with only one side of the conversation, because at least personally I find that a lot more engaging than just someone reading something, usually at least. And so that's the basic idea of this show, that it's sort of like someone explaining something to you in a conversational format. So I deliberately don't use a script. I also don't really do interviews.

I don't know if people would be interested in more interviews. So I've done one with Wisecrack, and there might be an opportunity in the future to do some more of interviews. But in general, I quite like the format as it is. I think it's something a bit unique and different that distinguishes this show from other shows. feel free to let me know if you agree or disagree with that, but that's the basic philosophy that I intend to keep the basic structure. Another key philosophy of the show is that I want episodes to be timeless and cumulative. So this is sometimes also called Evergreen Content,

meaning that it doesn't date quickly. So that's one of the reasons I don't discuss news or very recent discoveries so that people can keep going back and listening in the future. Of course, you can do that anyway, but it becomes a bit less relevant. And I also found it a bit annoying that some shows will kind of go over the same thing repeatedly if you listen to it for a long time because, you know, you have to assume that people haven't listened to previous episodes. And I felt that that's a limitation that means you can't get into more advanced material

without sacrificing a lot of depth or substance. And so I deliberately made the show so that there is a accumulation of knowledge based on past episodes. That's why I mentioned at the start of each, or many shows at least, the prerequisites that I recommend listening to beforehand. I don't actually know how many people will do that. I'd be interested if anyone has feedback on how many people listen to the shows in order or how many people pick out topics they're interested in

or listen in reverse chronological order. I actually have no idea. No one's ever told me that before. When I'm listening to a new podcast show, I'll often listen to just a couple of episodes and if I like it or just start at the beginning and then listen all the way through. So I have no idea if other people do that. At least the way that I've structured the podcast is so that I can get into more advanced topics by sort of setting the basis in earlier episodes.

And I think that that is relatively unique. Most shows that I know of don't do that. Something else that people have sometimes asked about are the sources that I use for the podcast. So that's quite variable. It depends on the topic. So some things are fairly well-known, well-established knowledge that just cover really in even high school or first-year university. course. And for those, I make use of textbooks. So I have quite a lot of science textbooks. Perhaps I'll

share a picture of my bookshelves at some point to show you some of the books that I've used. I also draw upon my own lecture notes from courses that I've done and just kind of my own background knowledge of things that I've learned, as well as other useful websites, like hyperphysics, for example. It's a very useful source and other such websites. Sometimes I use courses, online courses, although that's less common, but sometimes it's useful or like online animations to help understand things can be handy. I use Wikipedia quite a lot, but not as a, not as a main source, more like as a way to help organize things or check definitions or other key points, but particularly as organizing knowledge and helping to make sure I don't miss key things.

Also for diagrams, it's very useful. So I use that particularly in writing up the notes of the the episode because it's just a quick way of getting everything structured and organized together. But I don't use that as like a primary source for most things. I'll generally use textbooks or lecture notes or other things. For some topics that are more specialized, I'll do original research. So I'll read journal articles for that, particularly review articles, sometimes original research. So I'm doing a lot of that for the economic growth episodes, for example. Some other episodes that I did that for include episodes on...

episodes on sex and gender, where I did quite a lot of original research there. Sovereignty constitutions in the state I did some research for. Gun Control, they did quite a lot of research. The episodes on intelligence, also I did a lot of original research for that. Well, by original research, I mean like looking up and reading original review papers. I don't mean like conducting a study. So the sources that I use do depend on the exact topic, but they are quite diverse. And I'll just put a plug here for the huge benefit.

of having science textbooks. So I'm talking about university-level textbooks. There's often kind of a first-year introductory books, and then there's more intermediate books for like second or third year, and then there's more advanced books that are more at the graduate level or close to that. And I have a range of those books from a whole host of different disciplines. There's still a few more that I'd like to collect. Unfortunately, new textbooks are quite expensive, but you can generally get second-hand textbooks of earlier editions for much cheaper online. It can be a bit harder to get graduate-level textbooks because they're not released as often and they don't go through as many additions. But I often recommend it because

there's some really good books out there, which they're not exactly page turners necessarily. But if you enjoy actually learning about a topic and you find a good textbook, then you can get huge amounts of pleasure out of that and learn a lot. And so that's sort of my go-to source to learn about new things, is textbooks as well as online review articles. So, that's what I'd recommend. I don't recommend, and I know this will make me unpopular with some of you, I don't recommend reading popular science books, because most popular science books that I've read

have a lot of pages and a lot of words for relatively little content. I'd much rather read about that in a, like, a chapter, or a couple of chapters of a textbook, or read a review article, or even watch some intro lectures online, than read through pages and pages of, you know, anecdotes and musings, and kind of long-winded introductions to things, and often the actual scientific content, not always, but often it's quite oversimplified,

and sometimes it's not referenced properly, that varies with author, and I think you tend to get a bit more of the author's own personal biases and reflections in there, at least from some that I have read, than you will in a textbook or in a review article, and I generally don't like that. So that's just my own point of view. I've expressed that before,

and some people say that they like popular science books because they need all that other stuff to sort of make it more interesting and keep them reading through it. And that's fine if it's your thing. But I just like to emphasize the textbooks particularly because I think most people wouldn't even think about buying a textbook unless they're required to for a course. But actually, if you enjoy just learning about things, then they're an excellent way to do that. That is kind of what they're designed to do. A lot of them have really good illustrations and good layout and so forth. Of course, you want to check reviews first.

Not all textbooks are great. but actually quite a lot of them are very good. So that's my plug for that. And I certainly use those as a source of the podcast a lot. One of the original intentions of the Science of Everything podcast was actually to be a bit more of a how stuff works kind of podcast, kind of focusing on, well, how things work. But I realized that to explain how things work,

I needed to explain quite a lot of basic physics and chemistry and biology and earth science and economics and so forth. So you need a lot of background theory and knowledge. And so that kind of, providing that kind of took on a life of its own. So I have done some How Stuff Works type episodes, most notably the series on how computers work, which I'm still quite proud of. And I do hope to do more of those in the future. Early on, fairly early on in the podcast, in the life of the podcast, I made a word document

in which I sort of went through the different scientific fields and made a list of different topics and sort of subtopics within that based on my, my own readings and textbooks and notes and so forth. And I estimate that based on that document, there is enough material for at least three to 400 episodes, and we've only done 100 so far. So no danger of running out of material. So some people have, in emails, asked about my personal background.

In the earlier days of the podcast, I was a bit reticent to share that. I'm not exactly sure why. I think part of it is because I like work to be. judged on its own merits and not on the basis of who created it. But nevertheless, I don't really see a whole significant reason to not share that. So my background is that I have studied as several degrees. I'm still studying at university. So when I started the podcast, I was actually studying a Bachelor of Arts degree, and my majors were in political science and economics, but I had always had a keen interest in science,

and that was partly obviously what motivated the show. Once I finished my studies in economics, I started a science degree focusing on physics, I did chemical physics and then some maths and computer science. I then, a year or two after that, sort of started a second degree by correspondence, well, a second science degree by correspondence, which was in biotechnology, genetics, and proteins, molecular biology sort of stuff, And I've finished both of those a few years ago now and have since started a master's degree in neuroscience at a different university, which is what I'm studying at the moment.

So this year, I'm working on my master's thesis. So I've been at university for quite a long time. As I mentioned, I've mentioned previously, I had some personal issues in 2018 into 2019, which unfortunately meant that I wasn't able to predict. produce as much content for the show. And I'm really hoping to bounce back from that. So we've already released a couple of shows this year. There's more in the pipeline. And as I've mentioned, I've got a really exciting multiple episodes here on economic growth and development, which I've been working on actually on and off for years now. And that's finally coming together. And so that will begin to release that hopefully by the end of this month. So that's to look forward to.

So in terms of the future of the show, I'm hoping to have a bit of a more regular release schedule. Roughly two episodes a month is what I'm looking at. So I want a fortnight. And to help to support the time and upkeep costs by accepting donations, which I hadn't previously done. But that would allow me to spend more time making content and getting out to you guys. And so that's where I'm hoping to take things to be able to keep the show sustainable by being able to take some donations to cover that time cost. which means I don't have to work as much and therefore have the extra time. So I'm really excited about that.

I hope that will help to reinvigorate the show and help me to cover many more of the topics that I would like to get done. In addition to my interest in science, I'm also very interested in philosophy. So I think I mentioned a few years ago the idea of having more philosophy on the show. I haven't done that yet, but I think it would be interesting, particularly philosophy of science and epistemology, which is theory of knowledge. I think that's an actual tie into science. maybe a little bit down the road.

There's quite a few topics that I want to cover before that. Just things don't be meaning to get done for quite a while. But I think that would be good, so please feel free to let me know if that's something that's of interest to you or not of interest. I think there's a natural synergy between philosophy and science, and so I'd like to see more outlets kind of combine the two. Some of you might be interested in my blog,

which I don't know if I've mentioned before on the show. It's called the godless theist. It's a blog where I occasionally put up pieces that I've written, mostly relating to philosophy. Sometimes I write about history or some other things, but it's mostly philosophy. And the name reflects my interest in religion and atheism. Also, if you're interested in that sort of thing, I've actually published a book, which I haven't mentioned on the podcast before, because it's not really relating to science so much,

although I do talk about different scientific issues in the book. It's called Unreasonable Faith. You can find it, just search on Amazon. And I discuss some of the arguments for the existence of God in reference to a Christian apologist called William Lane Craig. I respond to and critically evaluate the arguments that he presents. So I know that that's not going to be of interest to everyone, but I thought that this is the appropriate show to mention that.

So that's one of my other interests. If anyone's interested in checking that out, feel free. I think part of my interest in science originates from, wanting to understand certain philosophical issues, I think that science has a potential to answer a lot of philosophical questions, not directly, but providing more information that then clarifies and helps us to construct better answers to long outstanding questions. This is really what happens in most disciplines of sciences they're born.

So what we now know is physics was originally called natural philosophy. Well, that really included, I guess, all of the natural sciences. as particularly around the time of Newton and as it developed its own methodologies and sort of accepted norms and theorists for answering questions, then it diverged and kind of became its own distinct discipline. And this has happened many times in the history of science with other disciplines branching off at different points. I'm particularly interested in understanding the mind, so cognition, thinking and reasoning, decision-making and language. And that's why I'm studying neuroscience, because I'm interested in the intersection between kind of cognitive, psychology, computer science, and neuroscience.

And I think that if we had a lot better understanding of the underlying the mechanisms involved in thought, then that would shed quite a lot of light onto fairly intractable philosophical questions like philosophy of language and epistemology and even ethics, actually, because a lot of these things fundamentally relate to understanding what we mean when we talk about concepts like right or wrong or knowledge and justification and causation and so forth. and I'm interested in trying to kind of dig down to the cognitive, neuropsychological underpinnings of thought and reasoning. If you're a materialist, meaning that you think that everything that exists

is the product of the interaction of physical particles in the material universe, then you kind of must think that thought and cognition and so forth are a product of physical interactions, and therefore at least in principle amenable to scientific materialistic and vestibuster, There are potentially some positions that can avoid that conclusion, but basically that's, I think, that holds for most people if you're a materialist. And anyway, so the idea is that although our understanding is far too primitive to be able to answer the kind of questions I'm interested in at the moment, I am optimistic that through the continuing development of computer hardware, application of ideas from machine learning and computer science, and much better ability. to take simultaneous measurements of many neurons at the same time and other imaging techniques that have been developed recently, optogenetics and other instrumentation that the neuroscientific profession

is continually and very rapidly improving. The confluence of these things will result in an explosion of our ability to understand how information is processed in neural systems and how that's able to give rise to a complex thought and causal reasoning, categorization, inductive inference language and all these sort of higher cognitive phenomenon. So I may do some podcast episodes about that sort of stuff in the future. It's not the easiest to put into episode form because a lot of it's sort of unknown.

But again, let me know if you're interested. This is the sort of thing that I am kind of working on in my thesis at the moment, a little bit, and hopefully if I start a PhD next year, which is my intention, then I'll be able to kind of work on more of this. So, anyway, that's a little bit about me and my career direction. I should probably mention why I shifted from economics to physics and then to neuroscience, because that confuses a lot of people. For me, I see science as a, I mentioned before, I see it as a continuum,

we continue with philosophy, particularly the social sciences like economics and psychology, are all trying to understand human behavior and human thought, and so I see neuroscience as a kind of a different approach to that. It has a different focus ease, but fundamentally it's trying to understand human behavior, thought, and action. So I don't really see it as that bigger jump. Ultimately, I'm very interested in trying to understand long-term trends, like, for example, economic growth and development, which I'm doing a series on, historical trends, societal trends, political trends, why things happen in the world. And to do that, we need to understand human behavior, and to understand human behavior, we need to understand how humans think and how they form beliefs and so forth.

To do that, I think we need to understand psychology better. And my view, not everyone shares this, but my view is that understanding the underpinning neurobiology, particularly at a sort of information processing level, only by understanding what's happening in the brain at this level of kind of resolution will be able to get a high enough resolution understanding of how we think and reason. A lot of cognitive psychology works on, at the moment, very mental effects that are demonstrated, and fairly very abstract models of them that don't really say anything.

think about the mechanism underpinning how the particular phenomenon occurs. And I don't really find this very satisfactory. Ultimately, what's happening in the brain is processing of information in neural circuits, and I really think that that is the correct best way, sort of best level, to analyze these mental phenomena. There's bound to be some researchers out there who disagree with this approach. That's fine. I understand it's, there are different schools of thought on this, but this is my view. Feel free to send me an email if you want to. to argue the point as to why the brain, we don't need to study the brain to understand, to understand the mind, which is what quite a few people think. But at any rate, so for me,

that sort of forges a connection between disciplines like economics and neuroscience. And physics has always interested me intrinsically, but also quite a lot of people who get into the field that I'm interested in moving towards computational neuroscience, which applies an information processing framework to understand the brain and information flow in the brain. A lot of people who go into that have backgrounds in either engineering or physics or computer science because it's quite quantitative. So it was important for me to have a fairly broad background in different sciences, including chemistry, physics and biology. I think it's an interdisciplinary study is underrated and a lot of good ideas in science come from sort of applying one idea or technique

to a different area and sort of combining ideas from different disciplines rather than just kind of chugging away with the insights from a single discipline or sub-discipline. There's value to but my interest is certainly more in trying in interdisciplinary focuses, and that's sort of what I'm trying to do with my current research. In addition to my interest in sort of bigger philosophical and social questions, I'm also interested

in science because I've, for a long time, liked science fiction, particularly Star Trek. I also like Star Wars quite a lot, although I don't regard that as science fiction. That's more space opera. I've also watched Battlestar Galactica and Stargate and Doctor Who. I think Star Trek's my favorite,

but obviously Star Trek isn't very hard science fiction. I'm also a fan of some of the classics like Isaac Athamas Foundation series. If you haven't heard of that, I strongly recommend checking it out. Honestly, anyone who likes this podcast is highly likely to enjoy that, I would say. So check that out. Other people like Larry Niven and Arthur C. Clark, I also enjoy. If anyone's interested in my producing podcast episodes relating to the science behind science fiction concepts or ideas,

Let me know. I don't think I've had anyone say that so far. It's a bit of a deviation from what I normally talk about, but I think it could be interesting. And it's often a good way to learn about the real world through the lens of a fictional world. At least I find that. So that's of interest to me and maybe a venture to some of you as well. Anyway, I think that's all the things I wanted to talk about in this special episode. Hopefully some of you found it interesting. For those who may not have or be looking, or those who are looking forward to more content, stay tuned.

I'll be releasing a new episode very shortly. If you enjoy the podcast, please give the show a rating on iTunes or the aggregator of your choice. It helps to spread the word about the show and helps more people to find out about it. You can send me an email. My address is Fods12 at gmail.com. That's FODS12 at gmail.com. Always happy to hear questions, suggestions, or just any feedback. If you'd like to support the show and help me to spend more time making more episodes, you can do so on Patreon.

just go to patreon.com slash James Fodor. Alternatively, if you prefer, you can also make a donation via PayPal. If you just go to the URL, PayPal.m.m. slash science of everything, that will take you to a direct link to make a donation of whatever size you like. I'm really thankful for all the people who've already made donations or sign up as patrons. Your support is very much appreciated and really does help me to be able to devote more time to the show. So thanks again, everyone for listening, and I'll talk to you next time.