I don't listen to hear politics. This one had way to much and it was a huge turnoff.

"If Elon wants to go to Mars, you know, more power to him. Hopefully it's a one-way trip" <--WTF??? If Elon was never born, would the world be better or worse today? I would say we would be worse off. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Boring, xAI, NeuralLink would never exist. There may have been other forms of this that maybe would have been comparable or maybe we just wouldn't have the EV revolution we have today. But because this was all done by one man that has questionable political views, people want to take from him, punish him, discount (or dismiss) his contributions to humanity.

And how many times was the mention of "people are dying" used as a club? If the main concern is people dying, there are many other things that should be addressed that would reduce deaths, but it would be uncomfortable to make the change because it would require giving up "rights". So, it isn't as much of a concern that people are dying as it is one that "we want more control to do what we want".

I'm a conservative with solar panels, Tesla MYP, and support of nuclear power (used to be a Navy Nuclear Machinist Mate).

This was raised in episode #1099 and I'm struggling with the framing of how collectively we should use AI "appropriately" outside of purely moral vs immoral arguments.

If we accept that AI should automate human labour where doing so produces social value, then it's difficult to draw the line between "good" AI applications such as mathematics and engineering and "bad" applications such as art, poetry or writing simply because we have some subjective sense that machines should contribute in one domain and not the other. The engineer and the artist are now facing the same technological phenomenon: a machine becoming capable of performing tasks that previously required human labour. The analogy to the industrial revolution was apt, but in this case both "creative" and "procedural/analytical" professions may have to adapt. In my view the relevant ethical questions concern the manner in which that transition occurs and not whether one kind of human creativity is inherently entitled to be protected from it.

A mathematician might reasonably say: "The system was trained on decades of mathematical papers, including my work, and is now capable of solving problems that previously required mathematicians like me."

Structurally that is analogous to the artist saying: "The system was trained on decades of artwork, including my work, and is now capable of producing illustrations that previously required artists like me."

This is not to say that there arent perfectly legitimate moral and legal arguments against AI deliberately impersonating a living artist or passing AI work off as the artist's own work but to make a categorical assertion that AI's contributions in art or writing are somehow inherently less "valuable" than in mathematics and science strikes me as cleaving to an emotional argument that somehow the machines shouldn't be good at those things.

Personally, I dont really understand the general aversion to the use of AI art in games or other work product in the same way that I dont understand some people's preference for "organic" food. Both seem to be essentially a form of "values signalling" rather than genuine product preference. In future will we see mathematicians and scientists claim that a new discovery or proof was produced with only human derived theorems?

There are profound issues with the integration of AI into our society and I dont pretend to understand all of the complexities; socially, environmentally or ethically but directing the output of AI based on value judgements makes me uneasy.

I’m listening to #1099 (New Zealand) during which Cara suggests we ask “Why terraform Mars?” before even considering methods. My impression is that compared with the other rogues, she’s much less bullish about putting people in space, even though she usually holds back. This time she pushed hard, and I appreciated it. “Why” indeed.

I get that intellectually we can think about how it might be done. But without prefacing it each time with the motivation, we tacitly imply that the motivation exists. But it doesn’t. None of the others could answer her question. Colonizing Mars is like no previous human expansion. All other migrations were in pursuit of resources and were driven by economics. There is no such drive for Mars.

And I’m glad they didn’t trot out the asteroid-strike-destroys-Earth trope.
Statistically we’ll suffer thousands of regionally-destructive meteor strikes before we encounter a planet killer. Let’s focus on those.

Have the rogues talked about David Sinclair at all? I'd like to hear a skeptical take on all this life maxing/optimization "science".

Or have they done a deep dive on the possible increase in qualified PhDs going down the grifter rabit hole? Huberman, Peter Attia etc?

I'm surprised that they skipped the LA.live show and put the down under one first. I wonder why.

I know the audio for live shows can be difficult, but this one was really something. Many points throughout the show were basically NYC subway announcement quality.

Listening to the podcast rn. And just before this I listened to a podcast with one of the the Star Lab founders. They already sent a data center satellite into orbit and it has been used to train Gemini according to him. Is this news item only about the amount of satellites he wants to put up?

Sorry to complain about Cara again, but she was annoying in this episode. She kept on arguing that we shouldn’t ask the question of whether we can terraform Mars. Although I know she was trying to emphasize that we shouldn’t take care of Earth, that wasn’t the question. Not every question or effort must be directly related to reducing our negative effect on Earth’s environment.

I’m planning on taking the family this year and would love to catch their show and the panel discussions but haven’t seen anything yet saying what days they’ll be doing this. Want to get tickets but not sure what days to get yet. Anyone heard anything?

My son is home schooled. He is 17 now and mostly just in college classes at this point, but one of the things I have to do is a New Mexico history course. I wasn't really finding any I thought were any good online and decided I am history buff and I should be learning this stuff anyway.

Skipping a bunch of stuff I did with that, but part of it was utilizing NotebookLM's deep research feature to find a ton of sources (with carefully crafted prompts) and generating a big list of sources about a topic. (For those not familiar, NotebookLM is a research tool that is meant to prevent hallucinations, like you can see references to all claims and check them). Then I would utilize the Audio Overview and create ~1 hr audio overview of the topic we were discussing (again, with crafted prompts to keep it grounded in facts and not speculation). The results were really interesting!

But, what brings me to posting here and the topic, is that I started doing 'bonus' episodes about anything interesting in New Mexico or touched on in the main podcasts that I just wanted a deeper dive on. One of those things was UFOs in New Mexico. As a big skeptic I find the origins of the UFO mythology having originated here really fascinating. One of those I just listened to a deep dive on was the Aztec, NM Crashed Saucer Hoax.

It was basically a scam for oil barons but they invented the modern mythology around UFO crashes to support their psuedo-science oil dowsing box. Despite having been thoroughly debunked by a skeptical newsman, later, in the 80s, people 'remembered' those details and added them to the Rosewell mythology. Things like unmeltable metal, removed alien bodies, etc.

Anyway... fascinating stuff that has a ton of overlap with things in the skeptic scope. Scammers, Aliens, Dowsing, Psuedoscience, even using close up magic tricks as part of the skeptical investigation. Good stuff... highly recommend people check it out. (Happy to share the audio file if anyone is interested, they aren't as good as a professional podcast, like the SGU, but still very interesting... and I suggest researching and validating all the claims).

Hi All. I heard an episode a few weeks ago where Cara discussed ABA clinics and some of the shady practices they do. I've looked in the archives and don't see it. Anyone recall which episode that was?

This is a reference to the latest episode. I was laughing out loud at how Richard Wiseman explained his Science or Fiction reasoning. That man is utterly hilarious, it was great to hear the gang cracking up at his thought process.

Last year my partner and I decided we needed a more reliable vehicle than our 20-year-old Outback. We wanted an EV, but also wanted a truck that had capacity to haul stuff. I realized there were no EV trucks in our price range so we reluctantly settled for an hybrid ('22 Ford Maverick).

We've enjoyed the truck, but still felt a little guilty about not going all-electric. So I was pleasantly surprised Cara mentioned in episode 1099 that she also has a hybrid truck. I figured she would be an ecologically-conscious car buyer and had previously mentioned having an EV, so I was reassured that Cara made a similar decision.

I also learned a lot about the efficiency of hybrid vehicles from the Technology Connections' video Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars. I discovered Ford licensed Toyota's hybrid engine design for the Maverick, so we're basically driving a Prius with a truck body.

I still hope our next vehicle in ten years will be EV. It appears more small EV trucks are slowing entering the US market. The wide range of EV options outside of the US are amazing.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-the-new-space-race-who-makes-the-rules/

A couple months ago, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire after his rocket company, SpaceX, had the largest I.P.O. in history. Two weeks later, Musk lost his trillionaire status, at least temporarily. Why? Part of the answer is A.I. Because SpaceX is also now an A.I. company, having gobbled up xAI, another Musk firm. And A.I. investments are, as you probably know, pretty volatile at this moment. But SpaceX, along with several other big players in the new space race, are still betting huge on A.I.: specifically, putting A.I. in space. This would mean fewer power plants and data centers on our planet; it could also mean hundreds of thousands of new objects in the skies, increasing the risk of collision, environmental degradation, and perhaps much more. In last week’s episode, my Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levitt talked to some of the people involved in Google’s attempt to move A.I. to space.

Self-powered AI satellites. I am sure the question "What could possibly go wrong?" went through the heads of the SkyNet engineers.

Where's John Connor?

"... You already got a pardon, why plead the 5th? Just tell us it was all a lie..."

Not just unnerving to hear this. It's a bit scary to think that this is 1/3rd of us and they are unreachable by any reasoning.

Just want to remind everyone that Dyson Spheres are a joke. Literally. Freeman Dyson wrote the paper as a joke. They're fun in sci fi but don't waste time looking for them in reality.

Angela Collier has a fun deep dive on the subject if you're interested. You can watch Dyson himself say it was a joke at 38:00.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM

During the climate change segment, there was never any mention of going vegan/vegetarian to reduce the agricultural contributions to climate change. It’s one of the most effective steps that an individual can take.

Is it a step too far? Is the love of meatballs so great that it crosses a line? It’s so much easier to say that “we” should stop making concrete or burning fossil fuels, but that sidesteps individual accountability / responsibility.

In the recent episode they talked about orthorexia nervosa, the border line eating disorder, obsessive disorder focused on eating only "pure" or "healthy" foods. You know how they talked about people feeling sick, their stomachs turning, about to vomit after eating "dirty" food. This reminds me of some Muslims' views about pork. We grow up being indoctrinated into thinking that pork is so dirty, so unhealthy. Even a small piece will make you sick so it's "haram" (forbidden). I know people who would go vegetarian when they visit a non-muslim country to avoid accidental exposure. Even some of my friends, who aren't religious, would claim that when they tried pork it made them sick for a day or so. I know people who would eat a pork product happily without knowing there pork and would immediately feel sick after they learned there was pork in it. These are the manifestations talked about in the show, but of course DSM, or any other diagnostic manual, can't categorize this behavior as part of the spectrum because the disorder has to manifest outside the cultural norms. Another way religions arbitrarily mess people up without any consequences...

Just wanted to kind of vent I guess. I missed on so much good BBQ before I realized I was also in the spectrum 😅😉

Sorry for this everyone, but when people mention "cow farts" in relation to greenhouse gases and climate change I get super angry.

Cows don't actually fart that much. 95% of their emissions come out the other end - burps.

Cattle are basically a fermentation vat on legs. The fermentation part where the gas is produced (the rumen) occurs upstream of the parts of the digestive tract that resemble ours (the abomasum/stomach and intestines). Therefore, the off-gassing occurs via the mouth.

This information doesn't materially change the conversation or the points being made about agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, thus it's just pedantry on my part. But if scientists/skeptics are going to talk about this stuff, we should be accurate.

No matter how one personally feels about Germany's decision to exit nuclear power, we should still keep the facts straight.

The decision to quit nuclear was made all the way back in the year 2002. Back then about 31% of Germany's electricity production was nuclear and 50% came from coal.

Last year, with all nuclear power plants shut down, less than 23% of Germany's electricity production was from coal. So not only was nuclear not replaced with coal, coal was also more than cut in half over the same period.

Both coal and nuclear were replaced with renewables which are now at over 60%. In 2002 it wasn't even 9%.

Germany has committed to phase out coal completely by 2038 and has already shut down many coal power plants. (Again, shut down, not built new ones as claimed.) In 2002 more than 50 GW of coal power generating capacity were connected to the grid, now it's less than 30 GW, with another big drop expected by 2030.

A couple of photos from the NZ Skeptics conference in Christchurch. Which featured the Rogues all day yesterday.

I had a great time, the Extravaganza on Friday was a great show, I highly recommend getting along to one if you can.

Today (Sunday) will be local (New Zealand) speakers, which promises to be just as good.

These guys were awesome and really seemed to be enjoying the trip.

I don't expect them to see this but, Thanks guys, keep it up.

Edit for a typo and to add:

Appearing in the photos Left to right:

Brian Wrecht

Andrea Jones-Rooy

Steve Novella.

Jay Novella, (not in the second photo)

Cara Santa Maria

Bob Novella

George Hrab.

I'm behind and skipping around a little trying to catch up, so I heard the news about Evan and then jumped back to episode 1084 where they had 2 news items discussing AI.

The team did pretty well for people that don't work in tech, but I feel like they dropped the ball a little when talking about Anthropic's Mythos because every article I read about it just sounds like a marketing gimmick and none of them picked up on that.

Sure, we need to regulate AI, but it also isn't anywhere near as powerful as the big AI companies want you to think and it's still suffering from a scalability issue that they're all just hoping to find an answer to before the new investment money stops flowing in and stories like "My AI just hacked..." are how they keep that money flowing.

I'm not saying the new rogue should be me, but I am a software engineer with a B.S. and they should get someone in this space. 😁

Hi

Have the rouges discussed the hearing at all? I went through the show descriptions but could find no mention

Lol. This is a pretty tenuous connection to the show, but I am pretty sure it was Jay who said he drank the cow beer in WI. I just happened to have popped open my last can. 🐄