Name: The Impact of Fad Psychology on Journalism
Uploaded: 2021-07-13T17:04:42.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Impact of Fad Psychology on Journalism' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-07-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Impact of Fad Psychology on Journalism' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-07-13. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- This is your book about psychological things, right?
Explain your book.
- Yeah, it's The Quick Fix:
Why FAD Psychology Can't Cure Social Lose.
That's a good sign that I had to look at the book
to remember what it's called.
I was a science editor at New York Magazine.
I wrote about psychology, basically.
And every day, we get press releases from Harvard,
from Yale, from University of Pennsylvania,
that psychologists are figuring out amazing stuff
about how to fix the world.
How to fix racism, how to fix the educational system.
And a lot of these, when I looked into them more,
there's like nothing there.
There's no actual result there.
And people spend hundreds of millions of dollars
on these ideas that don't really do anything.
Have you ever taken the,
do you know the implicit association test?
What that is? - No.
- All right, do you know implicit bias?
- Yes. - Okay.
So this is a test.
You sit at a computer.
It tells you how unconsciously racist you are.
So anyone listening to this who's done a diversity training
recently at work has probably heard of the implicit association test.
Since 1998, leading psychologists are like,
"This test will measure your unconscious racism,
racism you're not even aware of."
And this leaks into the real world and makes you do racist stuff.
And we end up spending millions of dollars on it.
Every school embraces it.
Every company embraces it, except whoops, there's nothing there.
It doesn't actually measure anything.
So I'm really interested in those instances where like the most,
and maybe this is a why I should drink with Alex Jones.
We're the most important experts in the world.
Tell us shit.
And it's just, it's not true.
- Hmm. - Yeah.
- Um, how much has to do with, when the spreading of this kind of information,
how much of it has to do with click bait?
One of the things that's disturbed me over the last decade or so is that
journalism,
even journalism at its highest levels, without naming any names, but like fabled
institutions
are resorting to click bait.
You know, my friend Kurt Metzger said something about the New York Times once.
He said, "It's like a fat girl's Tumblr blog now."
And I'm like, "That is such a fucked up thing to say."
But what he was saying was that there's stories that are written in there that
are,
they're not what you associate with the New York Times of old.
I still read the New York Times, I still love it.
- Me too. - I think it's great.
I mean, I think people are always looking for flaws in any institution, right?
Especially a fabled one in times of chaos like we are today.
- Part of us wants to see them collapse.
- Exactly. - Yeah.
- Part, yeah, people do, but I still think they're the best.
And I think it's, there's something about having a reputation to uphold that
does force
people to the highest standards.
But those standards are different.
It's very difficult to find unbiased objective news with a clean headline today
because people
aren't buying the newspaper like they were.
- Yeah.
- It's mostly clicking things online.
And, you know, there's a lot of these that have, they rely on subscription
services.
You know, they rely on someone coming along and saying, "You know what?
I value your journalism so much, I'm going to give you some money."
And then you have to justify the articles.
Like, you know, there's ads on these articles in a lot of times and you've got
to get people
to click on them.
So you have maybe a title to that article that's not totally accurate or bends
the truth a little bit or it's inflammatory.
- Well, and everyone gets more desperate because they just need to keep feeding
the beast.
So I think the key difference is like, I would imagine, you know, I never got
to be a science
writer or editor in 1990, but back then journalism was healthy.
You could be a writer, you know, you publish, it's still hard work, but you
publish three
articles a week, four articles a week.
When I was editing Science of Us, that was the sort of behavioral science site
at New York
Magazine.
I forget what it was, I think we had to publish like 15 to 20 things a week.
So when Harvard--
- That's a lot.
- Yeah, dude.
When Harvard sends you a press release, like we have this amazing new study, we're
like,
great, write it up.
We don't call the researcher.
We don't read it closely.
Oftentimes we read the press release, but not the study itself.
And it's sort of like, the press releases often, they don't quite lie, but they
leave
out a lot of details.
And so 2010 was sort of the peak when the stuff in my book in psychology, like
the worst
psychology was being published.
2010 was also when things got really, really clickbaity, I think.
- Why was, what happened in 2010 that like the worst psychology got published?
- This is where it gets complicated, but like certain areas of research, so one
of them
is called social priming.
And that's the idea that if I like, if I flash an American flag before your
eyes for
300 milliseconds, you'll get way more patriotic.
And it sounds like voodoo magic, but for a while people really believe these
results.
And the reason they believe them is because like, there's all these ways you
can fuck up
statistically.
And you publish stuff that appears to be true, but isn't false.
So, let's say I asked you off the bat, take the top psychology journals around.
What percentage of the findings in them would you say could be replicated later
on if you
run it back?
- Oh, I have no idea.
- It's about a 50%.
There's a coin flip chance that anything you read in the top psychology
journals, some people
think it's higher, some think it's lower.
- Have you ever read the stuff that Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay and Peter
Boghossian put
out?
- I've read some of their stuff.
Yeah.
- Yeah.
Where they published these sort of-
- Oh, SoCal Square.
- Satirical-
- Yeah.
- Satirical scientific papers that actually got accepted.
- The dog rape.
Dog rape.
- Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it had the most- see if you can find the title of their dog, because it
had to do
with homosexuality, but meanwhile, they were getting lauded for these things.
They were getting applauded for, like, fat bodybuilding.
- Right.
- Like, there's a lot of- where they were joking around about how bad academia
has gotten.
- Yeah.
- And they made these farcical papers, and some of them won awards.
- A lot of the problems they are concerned with, it's not just sort of like the
wacky,
whatever, Marxist geography.
It's like some of the top psychology papers in the country.
- Right.
- And I- it's tricky, because like, I want people to trust experts.
I want people to trust science, but a lot of scientists themselves don't know
what they're
doing.
- Yeah.
- It makes it complicated.
- A lot of scientists don't know what they're doing.
How so?
- So, it's hard to explain this without getting into some statistics.
I'm not good at statistics, but basically, people realize that, like, the test-
the statistical
test people do to decide if something is significant.
Meaning, like, we're pretty sure Joe Rogan comes out with a pill to cure the
common cold.
We give 50 people that pill, we give 50 people a placebo.
The people who take the pill do better.
The cold goes away.
At a certain threshold, you're like, this is a real result.
This isn't just random statistical noise.
And it turns out there's lots of ways to fool yourself into thinking the pill
works when
it doesn't.
And that's basically what psychologists realized, and that led them to
understand that, like,
arguably most of what they publish is just- is garbage, basically.
- Do you know what a nocebo is?
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
That's- one of my favorite stories was a guy who was involved in a test where
they were
doing a study where they gave him- they gave, you know, one group an SSRI and
the other
group they gave a placebo.
This guy, for whatever reason, took a shitload of pills and ran to the hospital
with an elevated
pulse, high blood pressure, holding this pill bottle, freaking out, thinking he's
dying,
telling them that he fucked up and he took the whole bottle of pills and he's
gonna die.
Um, they contact the physician.
The physician comes down and informs him that he was a part of the control
group and he had
taken a placebo.
And within minutes, his heart rate drops down to normal, his blood pressure
drops down to
normal and he's fine.
So this guy who was convinced he was gonna die had just completely done it to
himself.
He had decided that he had taken some sort of fucking poison or something, you
know, some
horrible medication and far exceeding the dose you're supposed to take.
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