Science. The thing we love and respect so much, we only allow scientists to be portrayed by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nicolas Cage, and Al Pacino. That is how much we respect them and the complexity of the work they do. Science is constantly producing new studies, as you would know if you've ever watched TV. A new study shows how sugar might fuel the growth of cancer.
A new study shows late... Night snacking could damage the part of your brain that creates and stores memories. A new study finds pizza is the most addictive food in America.
A new study suggests hugging your dog is bad for your dog. A new study showing that drinking a glass of red wine is just as good as spending an hour at the gym. What? That last one? No!
No! That last one? The last one doesn't even sound like science.
It's more like something your sassy aunt would wear on a T-shirt. And when studies aren't blanketing TV, they're all over your Facebook feed, with alerts like, study finds liberals are better than conservatives at smizing, your cat might be thinking about killing you, and scientific study shows that bears engage in fellatio. And by the way, I'm not interested.
Let me know when bears start engaging in some mutually pleasurable 69ing. Hashtag bear pleasure, hashtag feminism. Time dot com once even ran the headline, Scientists say smelling farts might prevent cancer. Which I would say was the most unfortunate thing Time ever published. But then, this is a magazine that once did a cover story on those Asian American whiz kids.
The point is, there are now so many studies being thrown around, they can seem to contradict one another. In just the last few months, we've seen studies about coffee that claim it may reverse the effects of liver damage. help prevent colon cancer, decrease the risk of endometrial cancer, and increase the risk of miscarriage.
Coffee today is like God in the Old Testament. It will either save you or kill you, depending on how much you believe in its magic powers. And after a certain point, all that ridiculous information can make you wonder, is science bullshit?
To which the answer is clearly no, but there is a lot of bullshit currently masquerading as science. So tonight, we thought we'd talk about science. We thought we'd talk about a few of the reasons why. And first, not all scientific studies are equal.
Some may appear in less than legitimate scientific journals, and others may be subtly biased because of scientists feeling pressured to come up with eye-catching, positive results. My success as a scientist depends on me publishing my findings, and I need to publish as frequently as possible in the most prestigious outlets that I can. Now that's true.
Scientists are under constant pressure to publish, with tenure and funding on the line. And to get published, it helps to have results that seem new and striking. Because scientists know nobody is publishing a study that says, nothing up with acai berries. And to get those results, there are all sorts of ways that consciously or not, you can tweak your study. You could alter how long it lasts, or make your random sample too small to be reliable, or engage in something that scientists call p-hacking.
That's p-hacking with a hyphen, not to be confused with facking, which, as I think everyone knows, is a unique way of doing things. a euphemism for the Philly Fanatic. Now, p-hacking is very complicated, but it basically means collecting lots of variables and then playing with your data until you find something that counts as statistically significant, but is probably meaningless. For example, the website FiveThirtyEight surveyed 54 people and collected over a thousand variables, and through p-hacking the results, was able to find statistically significant correlations between eating cabbage and having an innie belly button..
drinking iced tea and believing Crash didn't deserve to win Best Picture, and eating raw tomatoes and Judaism. And the only thing tomatoes have in common with Judaism is that neither of them really feel quite at home in the Upper Midwest. But you don't even need to engage in these kinds of manipulations to get results that don't hold up.
Even the best design studies can get flukish results. And the best process that science has to guard against that is the replication study. where other scientists redo your study and see if they get similar results. Unfortunately, that happens way less than it should.
Replication studies are so rarely funded and they're so underappreciated, they never get published, no one wants to do them, there's no reward system there in place that enables it to happen. So you just have all of these exploratory studies out there that are taken as fact, that this is a scientific fact that's never actually been confirmed. Exactly. There is no reward for being the second person to discover something in science.
There's no Nobel Prize for fact checking. And incidentally, there's no Nobel Prize for fact-checking, is a motivational poster in Brian Williams'MSNBC dressing room. And for all those reasons, for all those reasons, scientists themselves know not to attach too much significance to individual studies until they're placed in the much larger context of all the work taking place in that field.
But too often, a small study with nuanced, tentative findings gets blown out of all proportion when it's presented to us, the lay public. Sometimes that happens when a scientific body puts out a press release summarizing the study for a wider audience. For instance, earlier this year, a medical society hosted a conference at which a paper was presented comparing the effects of high and low flavanol chocolate during pregnancy. If that sounds narrow and technical, it was supposed to be.
There wasn't even a control group of women who didn't eat chocolate. And the study found no difference in preeclampsia or high blood pressure between women who ate the two chocolates. So there is no way a study that boring can make it to television, right?
Well, wait. Because that medical society issued a press release with the much sexier but pretty misleading title, The Benefits of Chocolate During Pregnancy. And because most TV producers just read press releases, this happens. Turns out if you're pregnant, eating 30 grams a day of chocolate, that's about two-thirds of a chocolate bar, not the whole chocolate bar.
could improve blood flow to the placenta and benefit the growth and development of your baby, especially in women at risk for preeclampsia or high blood pressure in pregnancy. Except that's not what the study said. It's like a game of telephone.
The substance gets distorted at every step. And I can only imagine how someone who watched that segment must have described it the next day. Or the news said our baby is made of chocolate and it's okay if I eat it, but only two-thirds.
And it is not like the media needs help blowing things out of proportion. Remember that time story about farts and cancer? It turns out the study never mentioned either of those things. It just pointed out that certain sulfide compounds are... to use our useful pharmacological tools to study mitochondrial dysfunction.
And while that time story was later heavily corrected, the scientists told us that we still get phone calls and emails from strange radio and TV shows wanting us to talk about farts. Which is clearly a waste of their time. They're doing valuable work.
They shouldn't be wasting their time fielding calls from drive-time DJs Gas Man and The Beef. And there is no doubt some of this is on us, the viewing audience. We like fun, poppy science that we can share like gossip and TV news producers know it.
That is why you constantly hear stuff like this. Men. Listen up, a brand new study says a woman is more open to romance when they are full, opposed to being hungry.
Okay. First of all, no shit. Anyone is more open to anything when they aren't.
and you can't be too darn hungry. But you should know that study involved only 20 women. And you cannot presume that 20 women can speak for all women. This is science, not the United States Senate.
And then... And then there was this eye-catching report from just last year. A university in England says drinking champagne every week may help delay dementia and Alzheimer's disease. They say only one to three glasses a week, a week, can be effective.
for your health. Fantastic news. No, it isn't.
No, because there's a big issue with that study, aside from the fact that if you are celebrating with champagne three times a week, your standards for celebration need to be much higher. Champagne is acceptable on New Year's, Valentine's, birthdays, and if and when Henry Kissinger dies, and that's it. That is it.
That is the full list. But the bigger issue is, that study was performed on rats. And how do you not tell people that?
And how do you not also show them photos of the experiments? Oh! You'd think they would have paired it with some cheese, but it appears they went with cocaine. God, that's chic.
Dogs are chic rats. It's not the drugs that make them cool, it's their confidence. But the truth is, while studies performed on rats and mice are undeniably useful, their applicability to humans can be very, very different. ...be limited.
The overwhelming majority of treatments that work on lab mice do not wind up succeeding in humans, which means two things. A, we shouldn't rush out to report rodent results, and B, during lab mouse funerals when they say, at least he didn't die in vain, most of the time they are lying. I know it hurts to hear that, but them's the breaks, mouse.
Now, to be fair, it's not always the news media. Sometimes researchers themselves will oversimplify the science. Even TED Talks, which have had some amazing speakers, have also featured some morning show style science in the past. Like, uh, Paul...
Zach's 2011 talk on a hormone produced in the brain called oxytocin, which he even gave a catchy name to. This little syringe contains the moral molecule. It's so easy to cause people's brains to release oxytocin. I know how to do it.
And my favourite way to do it is in fact the easiest. Let me show it to you. Come here, give me a hug. There you go. Here's your prescription from Dr. Love.
Eight hugs a day. We have found that people who release more oxytocin are happier. And they're happier because they have better relationships of all types. Dr. Love. says eight hugs a day.
First of all, don't call yourself Dr. Love. That's the nickname a tabloid gives a dentist who ejaculated on his sedated patients. And second, there is no... There's no way that I would be happier giving eight hugs a day. I'm English, that is four lifetimes worth of hugs.
And look, by now, you probably won't be surprised to learn the real science on oxytocin is more complicated than the term moral molecule suggests. Because while it has been found to enhance positive emotions like bonding and trust, researchers have also found that it can enhance negative emotions like envy and bias. So while promising, the science on this is still very much in... which probably explains why a recent survey of oxytocin research warned, the reports about it influencing a large number of social behaviours should be viewed with healthy scepticism. Which is really a long, technical way of saying what you probably knew in the first place, which is, when a strange man calling himself Dr. Love offers to hug you eight times a day, say no.
And you can see, you can see just about all of the problems that I've described, plus one more in a study that made the rounds last year. The new study claims that driving while dehydrated is just as dangerous as driving drunk. say drivers who drank just one ounce of water per hour made the same number of mistakes on the road as those over the legal limit with alcohol. Doctor, when I heard this, I thought this cannot be true. Yeah, obviously it couldn't, because it wasn't true.
As Britain's National Health Service had already pointed out, that study was riddled with red flags, including that it was based on just 12 men, of whom data was only reported for 11, and it got funding from the European Hydration Institute, a foundation that has received over $7 million from Coca-Cola, a company that just happens to sell rehydration in the form of fizzy brown sugar water, carbonated urine, flat urine, diet urine. and grapefruit-flavored embalming fluid. And look, just because a study is industry-funded, or its sample size was small, or it was done on mice, doesn't mean it's automatically flawed, but it is something the media reporting on it should probably tell you about.
And you may think, well, hold on, where's the harm here, so long as I don't try to fart cancer away, or fillet a bear, no one's getting hurt. But I'm not so sure about that. Because think of it this way, this is the problem.
This is a chart mapping the results of studies of things like coffee, eggs and wine. All of them have been linked to raising or lowering your risk of cancer, depending on the study. And everything causes cancer is not the conclusion you want to draw from science. It's the conclusion you should draw from logging on to WebMD, where that is their motto. Because if I were to tell you about each of those studies in isolation, at some point you might reasonably think, well, no one knows anything about what causes cancer.
And that's not true. And that is a problem, because that's the sort of thing that enabled tobacco companies for years to insist the science isn't in yet. And if you think I'm exaggerating about the impact that this misreporting can have on our faith in science, look at an example from some of the people most guilty of it.
Because the Today Show, which lives for scientific studies, recently concluded one segment like this. Like a lot of studies that we love around here, there have been a couple, especially related to women, about the benefits of... says I get all serious on whole milk.
Hey, whole milk. But it's true. There's a lot of research, though, that says actually Actually having whole milk or having whole fat dairy products actually can help you lose weight. I think the way to live your life is you find the study that sounds best to you and you go with that.
No! No, no, no, no! In science...
in science, you don't just get to cherry pick the parts that justify what you were going to do anyway. That's religion. You're thinking of religion.
That is what you're thinking of there. And look, this is dangerous. This is really dangerous.
If we start thinking that science is à la carte and that if you don't like one study, don't worry, another will be along soon. That is what leads people to think that man-made climate change isn't real or that vaccines cause autism, both of which the science... scientific consensus is pretty clear on.
Science is, by its nature, imperfect. But it is hugely important. And it deserves better than to be twisted out of proportion and turned into morning show gossip. So, if they are going to keep saying, a study says, they should have to provide sourcing and context or not mention it at all. And I know what you're thinking, well, hold on, if that happens, where am I going to get all my interesting bullshit from?
Don't worry, we have you covered. Do you love science in all its complexity, but wish it could be a little less complex and a lot less scientific? Introducing Todd Talks, where the format of TED Talks meets the intellectual rigor of morning news shows. Chocolate.
Mmm. It will kill you. What if I were to tell you all that the cure to racism... is coffee. And in my research, I found out red wine makes babies 20% more sociable.
That's a baby we can work with. At Todd Talks, we've raised the bar on entertainment by lowering the bar on... what constitutes science.
Our scientists at the Skittles Foundation for Rainbow Tasting have done some pioneering work. We placed 37 volunteers from Tulsa, Oklahoma, on an all-Skittle diet for six weeks, and guess how many were killed by baboons? One. Thirty-four people lived. Two were killed in a non-baboon-related murder-suicide.
Why do we do this? Because you love science, but you don't want to hear its process accurately depicted on a stage. I conducted a randomized, double-blind trial on the effects of coffee on cancer of the esophagus.
And while there were statistically significant decreases in incidences of cancer in the mice that were given the coffee compared to the control groups, any definitive conclusions will of course have to await human trials. peer review and replication. Now, of course, this... I think what he's trying to say is coffee cures cancer. Yes!
We did it! We finally did it! Coffee cures cancer!
You won't find our speakers at TED Talks because they're not afraid to ask the hard questions. Are eggs good for you? Or are they bad for you?
What if I were to tell you they were both? What if I were to tell you they were neither? What if I were to tell you they were both and neither?
Yes! feature the kinds of scientific insights that aren't just uncredible, they're incredible. Stand butt to butt with me.
Boom. By standing butt to butt we can actually increase our serotonin levels. How do you feel?
Weird. Weird. That's the serotonin working.
Okay, don't move. I'm going to step out. I'm going to come back in and give you a boost.
How does that feel? Um. She's speechless. If you like the idea of science, you'll absolutely love Todd Talks.
People, none of what you're hearing here is science. Science is a very slow and rigorous process that does not lend itself easily to sweeping conclusions. Whoa, take it easy, pal. Sounds like somebody needs a serotonin boost. Come on, bring it in.
Woo. Todd Talks have been called. called insightful, inspiring, and a clear trademark infringement. And guess what? I'm not even a scientist.
But my study shows that you seem 70% more authoritative if you're wearing a lab coat. And I am! Thank you so much! Woo!
Not a scientist! There you go! Yeah, yeah, yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah! Woo, woo, woo, woo!
Woo, woo, woo! Yeah! Woo!
Thank you! Thank you so much! It's been fun. I'm not a scientist. Todd Talks.
Because science doesn't have to be an exact science.