Hello, welcome to Sock Talk
with JNab and the Sundance Kid.
We are going to explore the frontiers of
technology, art and the human experience.
Hello, welcome to Sock Talk episode
number I don't know.
Welcome to Sock Talk.
Welcome to Sock Talk.
Sorry, we've been away for a while.
We're doing other things and got busy and
managed to get out of
sync and out of schedule.
But now we are back.
We will be away for a month
on holiday, but we are back.
We are back.
A special summer episode.
And today we've got a fun topic, which is
going to be conspiracy theories.
And why?
Because they are fun to talk about.
Okay, so first I thought it would be wise
to just start with
definitions and know what
we're talking about here.
So let's start with theory.
What is theory, firstly?
So the Oxford definition of theory is a
formal set of ideas that
is intended to explain why
something happens or exists.
According to the theory of relativity,
nothing can travel faster than light.
The debate is centered around two
conflicting theories.
I'm not sure about that last bit.
I'm not sure where that came from.
I think that's just used.
Sorry.
So I've just pasted in here and forgot
that those two next
sentences were the example
of the word being used because I wanted
to get specifically
what the Oxford definition
says.
But explaining why
something happens or exists.
And people quite often say, "Oh, things
are just a theory, just a theory."
For example, people will argue climate
change is just a theory or
evolution is just a theory.
But John, as a distinguished scientist,
maybe you can explain why
theory is actually important
and...
Sure.
Well, let me start by going back to one
of the two examples you just gave.
Evolution is not a theory.
Darwin's theory is about the
way that evolution happens.
So his theory, as published originally
and as modified
extensively for the second and
third editions, his theory was about the
mechanism that allows
evolution to happen.
Evolution is well known.
We see it in gut bacteria.
We saw it in how COVID changed over time.
Every chicken farmer knows about
evolution because they
raise chickens to either be good
for meat or good for laying eggs.
Or maybe, I don't know, good at composing
crowdsourced answers
for chat GPT, but they
breed them towards specific purposes and
they become increasingly
different as they're especially
bred.
Yes.
That is the difference between evolution
as a theory and a theory
about how evolution happens.
Evolution by natural selection.
Exactly.
And then specifically, the mechanisms of
natural selection that enabled evolution.
His theory made room for people to have
an understanding of
genetics because genetics
didn't exist as a field before.
Now, sorry, I got...
We're going tangents already.
Yeah, sorry.
On our definitions.
Darwinism and evolution,
man, that's my wheelhouse.
So a theory tends to be something that
you can prove or disprove.
It's not just a belief.
It has to be something that's provable or
disprovable, ideally
disprovable if you want
to be a 21st century scientist.
When we talk about a generally accepted
theory or a theory that
is new, so some people will
say climate change is just a theory, we
don't have enough evidence yet.
You don't need evidence for a theory.
You just need to see that to you it
accounts for some of the
behaviors that you're trying
to explain.
So people have theories about...
Well, looking in the monitor there,
people have theories about hair loss.
What causes it?
Whether it's genetic, which side of the
family it always comes
from and stuff like that.
Lots of theories, not so much evidence.
That doesn't mean that there's a
conspiracy theory about hair loss though.
It just means that there's
lots of theories about it.
Yeah.
Having your theory be
disprovable is a key factor here.
For example, we're
using evolution, let's say.
It's very easy to disprove if objective
reality allied for it,
which would be, I forget who
said it, but a rabbit, fossil, and a
Precambrian line, it would
immediately disprove a lot
of our...
Well, it wouldn't immediately disprove
it, but it would challenge
a lot of our assumptions.
So that's a key point of
making your theories solid.
An example from my first book that I use
in every class I teach,
sorry those of you taking
my classes after watching this, spoiler.
I like to hold a pencil up in the air.
I can do it with something else that
isn't too fragile, say a name badge.
Before speaking it all to the students,
let it fall to the ground.
If it falls every time I do that, that
doesn't prove anything.
But if just once it fails to fall, that
disproves the idea of a universal
gravitational system
that works the way we think it does.
If just once it falls slowly or goes off
sideways, that's a
challenge to that theory.
It means that theory doesn't
explain everything anymore.
It's a challenge to the theory, but it
doesn't immediately
disprove it because the larger
the claim, the more evidence you need.
It could be that you're in some weird
rotational device or
you're in one of those...
You're in one of those gravity testing
things or a carnival
where there's spinning around
and you drop it and it
flies off to the site.
In which case, my local observation will
not be the same as the
observations of those universal
and it becomes a proof of Einstein's
theorem of relativity
instead of gravity, which is
also cool.
Trying to disprove theory is really weird
and it's not very complex, but it's just
a little bit more complex
than most people realize.
We have a whole lot of folks who think
that they've disproved an
established theory because
they've noticed something.
I had a lovely conversation a couple of
months ago on the train
in Germany with a conductor
who asked me, "So, is
the world round or flat?"
He really wanted to let me know that he
was in on some
specialist knowledge that he could
share with me.
I said, "Well, it's not really either.
It's sort of egg-shaped because of
gravitational pull."
But he wanted to share with
me that the earth was flat.
We discussed a couple of ancient world
proofs so that it isn't.
Before we get into specifics, let's
continue with
establishing our definitions.
The next word to get
off here is conspiracy.
What do we mean by conspiracy?
Now, the Oxford definition here I have
is, "A secret plan by
a group to do something
unlawful or harmful," and then used in a
sentence, "the action of
plotting or conspiring."
That's what we mean here by conspiracy.
I think it's important to stress the fact
that people don't always mean unlawful or
harmful when they say conspiracy.
Folks will say that they conspired to
arrange a surprise birthday party.
Which is more of a ...
Yeah, I guess it's also a bit poetic to
say it that way because it's cheeky.
Exactly.
That's the thing.
English is a language full of poetical,
metaphorical use of standard terms.
It's hard for us to separate that when
we're trying to be
specific about definitions.
Certainly, conspiracy is
a crime in North America.
Just the act of conspiring is a crime
regardless of what
you're conspiring to do.
That's one of the many charges that
Donald Trump is facing
right now, is conspiracy
for organizing groups of people to
pretend to be electors and
take over and replace real
votes with false votes.
Yeah, so conspiracy, again, for some
reason hard to explain in a way that
everyone understands.
Lots of people will tell you that if you
have a different
definition of conspiracy than
they do, it's a conspiracy.
Okay, so then we go on
to conspiracy theory.
A belief that some secret but influential
organization is
responsible for an event or
phenomenon is what?
Again, the Oxford definition says.
They sought to account for the attacks in
terms of a conspiracy theory.
That leads us into what we're going to
talk about today
specifically, conspiracy theories.
Now, like we say, something can be, well,
proven to be more true than unlikely that
it wasn't true.
That's a silly way of saying it.
There are some conspiracy theories that
prove to be true through
people admitting it, release
documents, et cetera, et cetera.
I thought maybe we'll do a one for one.
We'll do a one for one.
We'll do one that proved to be true and
one that proved a crazy fun one.
Starting with some factual ones, the
tobacco industry for a
very long time were pretty
much presented with the evidence and knew
that there was a
serious link between smoking
and lung cancer.
But a bunch of them conspired to have
scientists be paid to argue the inverse.
That's not true.
That was before we knew that was exactly
what they were doing.
That was a conspiracy theory.
It was a theory that people were
conspiring to do
something unlawful or harmful.
So that's an example of one that is true.
Now, this is all-- I don't know if I'll
get into this now, but
this leads to potentially
a logical fallacy that you might hear a
lot of other, let's
say, conspiracy theorists
say, well, this happened.
Don't you know they conspired to do that?
And they can use that as an example.
But they do do things like this.
They is always a word that will--
Yes, they is very
important to conspiracy.
And they will use that and say, no, don't
you know the
governments do this all the time?
They can be bought and sold.
This happened.
But then just because X is
true does not mean Y is true.
Absolutely.
They share some structure in that there
are a group of people
conspiring to have an unlawful
outcome.
But you still have to engage your brain
to question whether it's true or not.
Do you want to say anything more on the
tobacco companies example?
Well, I think it's a really good example.
Certainly, when I was growing up, there
were the people who
believed still that tobacco
was good for you because they had been
raised on advertisements in
magazines and on television,
especially once television started,
advertisements where doctors
were saying how good tobacco
was.
And the cigarette companies in particular
were advertising the
benefits of smoking on
radio and television for decades.
So yeah, that was active.
And one of the things that came out with
the Freedom of
Information Act in various countries
was that all of the tobacco companies
knew that this was untrue.
And all of them agreed to hide that
information, to cover that information
up, to present false
information, to pay scientists, like you
say, not only to appear
and make false statements,
but to not publish the research that
could have been published to expose that.
So yeah, fantastic conspiracy theory,
which definitely was part
of the debate we're having
now until all the information came out.
Until the overwhelming evidence was
obvious to everybody.
Right.
Well, there are still
people who disagree.
There are.
You get the occasional fisherman who
smoked all his life and
people will say, "Oh, he's
got fresh air all his life."
But then you're counting, it's an example
of counting the hits and not the misses.
I was talking with a musician last week,
a musician who's been
a pro since the 1960s,
who told me that he, a heavy smoker all
his life, believes that
it's the cigarettes that
kept him healthy during the pandemic and
that they continue to
protect him during the cold
and flu season because the warm air in
his lungs is cloudy
enough with poisons that it
kills any bacteria
that try to thrive there.
Right.
That's not a conspiracy theory or that's
not a theory that I will
try to disprove because
if it's working for him, I'd like it to
continue to work for him.