Learn about why you can BS a BS-er; how you can get your hands on some of the world’s oldest books at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library; and a sea slug in the genus Elysia that cuts off its own head when it wants a new body.
Learn about why you can BS a BS-er; how you can get your hands on some of the world’s oldest books at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library; and a sea slug in the genus Elysia that cuts off its own head when it wants a new body.
You *can* BS a BSer — but it depends on the kind of BS by Steffie Drucker
You Can Encounter Some of the World's Oldest Books at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library by Reuben Westmaas
There's a slug that cuts off its own head when it wants a new body by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/you-can-totally-bs-a-bser
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why you CAN BS a BS-er; a library where you can find some of the world’s oldest books; and a slug that cuts off its own head when it wants a new body.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
There’s a saying that I’m not allowed to say on this podcast, but it pretty much goes like this: “You can’t BS a BS-er.” It’s basically a warning that you can’t hoodwink or mislead or deceive someone who is good at doing that to other people. But new research has found that, in fact, you can BS a BS-er! Not only that, but regular BS artists are actually more likely to believe BS themselves — although it depends on the kind of BS.
This hilarious research comes from the University of Waterloo in Canada. And they did it because it’s important to understand the reasons why people believe and spread misleading information — that way, maybe we can put a stop to it. To dig into this question, scientists conducted three studies with more than 800 participants in the U.S. and Canada. And like any good scientists, they separated the BS they studied into categories. There’s “persuasive BS,” which is intended to influence and impress people. And then there’s “evasive BS,” which people use to avoid hurting someone’s feelings or to protect their own reputation. Think of a politician being intentionally vague to cover up a mistake.
Scientists used the BS-ing Frequency Scale — that’s a real thing this team published last year, and yes, the actual name of the scale includes the full original explicit term. And the scale was designed to assess how often and which brand of BS participants dealt in. Next they had participants rate how receptive they were to randomly generated sentences filled with deep-sounding buzzwords or complex science vocabulary — stuff like “We are in the midst of a high‐frequency blossoming of interconnectedness that will give us access to the quantum soup itself.” Participants also rated the accuracy of five real and fake news headlines. Finally, they did some brain teasers and math and vocabulary tests to measure their cognitive ability and intellectual confidence.
The team found that those who frequently engaged in persuasive BS-ing were generally more susceptible to all forms of BS. They were also more likely to mistake superficial depth for actual wisdom. On the other hand, evasive BS-ers were actually less likely to believe fake news and were better at distinguishing actual profound statements from a bunch of buzzwords strung together.
Looking at the cognitive tests, the persuasive BS-ers were more confident in their performance — even though they didn’t score as well. The scientists think that overconfidence is the cause of their quote-unquote “BS blind spot.” The surveys also showed that these people also had less insight into their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The team said this shows that persuasive BS takes less analytical thinking than evasive BS does.
Here’s why you should give an S about this: Being able to sniff out fact from fiction is critical these days, especially as falsehoods and inaccuracies have exploded online. This work helps us understand how BS spreads, which could give us some tools to combat the scourge of misinformation.
When a museum or library displays something that’s several centuries old, the rule is usually “look, but don’t touch.” But what if you could touch it? How would it feel to touch the same pages as Shakespeare, or the same tablet as a Babylonian merchant? That’s not rhetorical. If you visit Toronto, Canada, and head to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, you can totally find out.
The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library is situated on the University of Toronto campus, and it makes more than 700,000 rare historic texts completely available to the public on request.
From the exterior, the library has an angular, modernist architectural style that was popular in the 1970s. That’s an unexpected match for what lies inside: centuries of literature. That’s centuries of human stories, thoughts, desires, and ideas. Oh, sorry, did I say centuries? Make that millennia: the oldest manuscript is a Babylonian cuneiform [kyoo·NEE·uh·form] tablet dating back to 1789 B.C.E.
The library collection includes the only surviving copies of Shakespeare's First Folio, an edition of the first English translation of Machiavelli's political works, and a collection of the works of Lewis Carroll. But there's probably nothing in the library that's more amazing than its various "monstrous" texts. While 16th century scientists were still wrapping their brains around what this world had to offer, they set to work cataloguing zoologies of truly impossible creatures with some real exotic beasts thrown in for good measure. At Thomas Fisher, you can find books like Aldrovandi's 1642 Monstrorum historia, which contains full-page illustrations of such beasties as satyrs, elephant-headed men, and surprisingly accurate baboons.
Visitors don't get free rein over these priceless pieces, but accessibility is central to the library's mission, obviously without putting the materials at risk.
So, if you’re looking for a place to encounter monsters, magic, and marvels, head to the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library. Let me know how those ancient pages feel.
Of all the body parts you can live without if you absolutely had to, your head is just not one of them. Heads are so important, even zombies can’t live without them. And yet! Recently, researchers in Japan made an astounding discovery. They found a sea slug that can decapitate itself and survive. And it does this… on purpose.
Sayaka Mitoh discovered this phenomenon almost by accident. She was a PhD. candidate studying sea slugs when she discovered what she thought was the scene of a grisly marine murder. One of her slugs had lost its head.
While the discovery of a headless slug was mildly shocking, the fact that the head didn’t seem to be too bothered by this was even more astounding. The disembodied head was crawling around in the tank as if having lost its body was only a just a little inconvenient.
After careful examination, Mitoh discovered that the neck wound was the result of the slug’s neck tissue dissolving. That was no surprise: Many species can ditch body parts this way, mostly as a defense mechanism. If you’ve ever tried to catch a small lizard, you might have ended up with a tail in your hand. You didn’t rip it off -- the lizard did that on purpose to escape.
These sea slugs are ditching their bodies on purpose too. The head will regrow a new body in a matter of days, with the heart and lungs regenerating in a week, and everything returning to normal three weeks later. I will repeat: everything is back to normal three weeks from being decapitated.
The slugs survive decapitation with a little bit of help from their food. The two species in the study feed on algae, which lets the slugs incorporate chloroplasts into their bodies. That allows them to steal algae’s photosynthetic superpowers, which provides the energy needed to survive and regenerate their bodies.
At this point, you’re probably wondering why the slugs do this. “Look Mom! No body!” is a fun trick, but the ability probably evolved for a more practical reason: Parasites. Mitoh believes the slugs ditch their bodies when they become infected, basically opting for a new, parasite-free body instead of trying to fight them off.
They say you shouldn’t cut off your nose to spite your face. I guess these slugs never got that memo.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Steffie Drucker, Reuben Westmaas, and Cameron Duke, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Reconvene with us for frictionless collaboration and idea-sharing tomorrow to absorb a compellingly expanded array of extensible core competencies to maximize ROI by leveraging just a few strategically resource-maximizing and process-centric minutes… seamlessly and syngergistically.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!