The Magic Wand Experiment | Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell
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- čas přidán 29. 06. 2022
- What if you could design any experiment you wanted? Without worrying about money, ethics, logistics, or even the laws of nature? Revisionist History kicks off the season by giving some of the world’s smartest scientists a magic wand to create the experiment of their dreams. We hear about the best twins study ever, how to test the effects of iPhone vs Blackberry, and a bizarre plan to get Americans into shape.
Interviewed in this episode: Stella Volpe, Joyce Bennenson, Adam Alter, David Epstein, Nancy Segal.
Season 7 (2022)
#revisionisthistory #podcast
ABOUT REVISIONIST HISTORY
Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell’s journey through the overlooked and the misunderstood. Every podcast episode re-examines something from the past - an event, a person, an idea, even a song - and asks whether we got it right the first time. Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance.
ABOUT MALCOLM GLADWELL
Malcolm Gladwell is president and co-founder of Pushkin Industries. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of six New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and Talking to Strangers. He has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1996. He is a trustee of the Surgo Foundation and currently serves on the board of the RAND Corporation.
ABOUT PUSHKIN INDUSTRIES
Pushkin Industries is an audio production company dedicated to creating premium content in a collaborative environment. Co-founded by Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg in 2018, Pushkin has launched seven new shows into the top 10 on Apple Podcasts (Against the Rules, The Happiness Lab, Solvable, Cautionary Tales, Deep Cover, The Last Archive, and Lost Hills), in addition to producing the hugely successful Revisionist History. Pushkin’s growing audiobook catalogue includes includes the bestselling biography “Fauci,” by Michael Specter, “Hasta La Vista, America,” Kurt Andersen’s parody Trump farewell speech performed by Alec Baldwin, "Takeover" by Noah Feldman, and “Talking to Strangers,” from Pushkin co-founder Malcolm Gladwell. Pushkin is dedicated to producing audio in any format that challenges listeners and inspires curiosity and joy.
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Here's an experiment. Your immune system gets a boost when you do something for others. That boost encourages you to think hey, I can become a better person. You eat better, get more exercise, sleep better, all the while not caring a fig if anyone cares about your experiment, especially not caring a fig if anyone even notices your new experiment. Anonymity is key. It's all about your object relations, stupid! You learn that good looks are about diet, sleep, modesty, focus and not about etc etc. Mr Micawber says Yes! Result happiness. Expenditure zero.
There is an interesting group of children in the Dominican Republic (and other places around the world) called Geuvedoces. They are born without the ability to convert testosterone to dihydrotestosterone. Dihydrotestosterone in children is responsible for penis development (in adult males, DHT over expression causes male pattern baldness). The Guevedoces are phenotypical girls until puberty. At puberty, the testes take over testosterone production from the adrenal. The higher concentration of testosterone from the testes at puberty overcomes the lack of DHT causing the penis to develop and the testes to descend. It would seem like this group of children would provide an interesting test/control group for the genetic coding of gender roles. Since they are XY individuals, they could be compared to sympatric XX girls to see if there is a behavioral difference before puberty. The lack of DHT is confounding, but it would be a very interesting study, especially if the parents don't know the sex of the child before the changes at puberty.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCevedoce
For the supermarket experiment by Stella Volpe, it’s already done in Denmark, tho it’s with price, not 3rd floor location.
Everything unhealthy are more expensive in Denmark. It get extra tax, because healthcare is free.
Eating at McDonalds is just as expensive as in a fine dining sushi restaurant.
Thus the Forbes? or Fortune? McDonald parity chart, comparing cost of living using prices of McDonalds is inaccurate. It always put Denmark as one of the most expensive place to live. If everything you eat comes from the grocery store, living there is not bad.
I probably should explain (below). I was talking to a Jamaican Psychiatrist in the clinic where I did my training and keen to learn, and mindful of how ineffectual I was, I pushed him to let me in on what he knew about the fundamentals of treatment. The minute a patient gets a job, he said, everything changes. We were talking about depression which, if you've never experienced it, is very real. You just can't see the point of doing anything. So, if you apply his observation to self improvement (instead of getting a job, your job involves doing something for yourself) the kickstart people can benefit from is to do something for someone else, without reward or praise etc. so you move into a new realm where it's just you and, free at last, real freedom. Remember, anonymously.
This man is a genius.
The mismatched sets of two pairs of twins (country and city) is the premise of the 1970 movie "Start the Revolution Without Me" with Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland, your fellow Canadian. Enjoy!
I get it. Great comment.
One of the most briliant and gifted with the ability to simply express complex problems
MG liked the final health and nutrition scenario?
A great book I read about managing cholesterol in the late 80's, said:
Stop spending billions and billions for surgery at age 60+. Spend millions on training Americans how to cook healthy. Database of recipes, cooking classes they may attend for free and take home the food, access to professional nutritionists. Maybe not even voluntary. Get into the schools and spend time educating people on what they may change, how they can change, what the results will be. Govt. tax breaks for the people producing healthy food, or reverse and tax the Frito-Lay corporation within an inch of its life.
Do we need a magic wand for that? Nope. Just the social/political will. Save trillions of dollars, and millions of lives.
Announce an experiment where everyone learns overtone singing. After 3 years we form massive choirs and create a cultural revolution. We compare the lives of the amazing singers to those who did nothing
I’ve heard of Nancy Segal before, would definitely love more interviews with her!
I enjoyed this thoroughly however I’m not sure why we would limit ourselves to twins if we have a magic wand that could presumably utilize clone and gene editing technologies. The data points would be limitless. You could have multiple identicals even raising their own clones, cross generations, make slight tweaks to measure effects, etc.
The Penis Experiment is really interesting, but I found the hypothetical conclusions to be a bit all-or-nothing - it was found in “Born to Care (or Not Care): How Gender Role Attitudes Affect Occupation Choice” (Patrick et al) that women born in states with more egalitarian views of gender roles were less likely to self-sort into occupations stereotypically associated with women (care roles) - potentially a mechanism through which the gender pay gap is created. While I could see that in young children nurture may not present itself, it seems like a stretch to say that, if nature proved to triumph, that raising a kid with little regard to their gender has no effect. Nonetheless, great, interesting episode!
yeah limiting this to "nurture" vs. "nature" is pretty reductive. The society these kids grow up in probably would have a lot more of an effect than how they were parented.
I agree, but she did add a caveat that the experiment will be cut off (oops) when they're around five years old. That would limit to a large extent the societal aspect of nature. Certainly not completely, but largely.
The gender pay gap is a myth, which a quick Google search will tell you, but yeah, the lady who wants to do the penis experiment is plainly sexist and believes very strongly in gender stereotypes.
Awesome segment 😀
Proprioception enhancement. All movement is made familiar for 3 years then that group studied to determine physical and psychological benefits
I like Malcolm Gladwell very much. I absolutely enjoyed RH and of course the books, his enthusiastic style, heck, I like him so much I'm willing to tolerate his love for corny country lyrics (ugh). But this episode puzzles me. He discusses the imaginary result of fictional experiments... Really? Also removing ethical standards from science may not be a bright idea even in theory - as promptly proven by the moderately horrific ideas presented. The fact that one of the ladies laughed hysterically whenever the magic wand....er... magic word, penis was uttered didn't help either.
Blackberry came out in 99, whereas Kurt Cobain died in 94 so the timeline doesn't add up.
There is another episode he did that talks this erroneous time slicing that our brain does with memory. The focus was on the days and weeks after 9/11
This makes me feel weird because I remember watching Kurt Cobain on TV I was four years old in 94. And I didn’t think that I ever had any memories from that young.