Last year we discussed the problem of scientists who host podcasts in which they credulously and uncritically interview celebrity scientists who are promoting junk science. There was Sean Carroll, a physicist who should know better, fawning over a Ellen Langer, Harvard psychology professor who was making wild claims about mind-body healing and also uncritically pushing the ridiculous claims by Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford biology professor who’s notorious for relying on bogus science.
Both these academic science superstars–the one from Harvard and the one from Stanford–have also been featured uncritically on the Freakonomics podcasts.
As I wrote a few months ago, If you’re a well-trained physicist or economist and you have a public platform and you use it to promote junk science . . . really, what’s the point of it all?
I mean, really, what’s the point? I can think of three reasons:
1. You’re invested in the scientist-as-hero narrative (which I hate), and these people are NPR and Ted-certified heroes with great stories to tell.
One reason why these celebrity scientists have such great stories to tell is that they’re not bound by the rules of evidence. Unlike you or me, they’re willing to make strong scientific claims that aren’t backed up by data.
So it’s not just that Sapolsky and Langer are compelling figures with great stories who just happen to be sloppy with the evidence. It’s more that they are compelling figures with great stories in large part because they are willing to be sloppy with the evidence.
2. Once you have a podcast, you want more listeners. (I have a blog here, I get it.) You get more listeners with good stories. The truth or evidence of the stories is not so important.
3. You outsource your judgment to the academic community, peer-review process, NPR, Ted, and other podcasts. If someone’s a decorated professor at a top university, with papers published in top journals, further validated by top-grade publicity, then it’s gotta be solid research, right? These science-podcasters are too busy to actually look into the evidence that purportedly supports the wild claims they’re promoting.
The question then is, what to do about it?
My original thought was that, if you’re gonna interview people who make outrageous-but-wow-it-would-be-amazing-if-true claims, you should grill them a bit. Express some skepticism and don’t let them just wave away objections.
The trouble is that if you do this your interview would not go well. If you had me on a podcast and asked me tough questions passed along by skeptics who don’t trust Bayesian inference or don’t like polling or whatever, that’s fine–I can respond to such things. That would be fine. But if you push hard against people who have the habit of stretching the evidence, I don’t know what would happen. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t just collapse and admit that their claims are unsupported. My guess is that they’d refer to other studies that they claim would back them up, to which the podcast host would be able to instantaneously respond. So it would just push things back one more step. Either a waste of time or a disaster if the person being interviewed gets angry.
So I don’t think the strategy of pushing harder in the interview would work.
I’ve listened to lots of podcasts, and I’ve never heard a single one in which the interviewers really challenge the people being interviewed. It’s just not done. I don’t recall even soft questioning, of the form, “People sometimes disagree with you regarding X . . . how would you respond to that?” For better or worse, podcasts just don’t do that.
But here’s something that Carroll and Freaknomics could do. They’ve already done podcasts promoting the work of notorious science exaggerators. Follow this up with interviews of skeptics.
In particular, I recommend interviewing Nick Brown, my coauthor on this recently published paper and an articulate explainer of the problems with junk science in psychology.
Nick isn’t an Ivy League professor, but . . . you’re not gonna tell me that Carroll and Freaknomics are status-obsessed, right? If anything, it’s a great populist story, that Nick Brown, this guy from nowhere, was able to puncture the bubbles of so many highly-credentialed purveyors of junk science. It’s the emperor’s new clothes!
So, Sean Carroll and Freakonomics, here’s your opening. Invite Nick Brown on to your podcast. Go for it.