ASM181 Free Speech, Carbon Taxes, and Search Engine Control

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free speech carbon taxes and search engine control all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemic [Music] science faith to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i mike mccarg answer your questions about science faith and life we've been doing this for a few years now and it's tons of fun because this is a space where all questions are welcome without judgment without hesitation any question asked sincerely i believe is worthy of a response so what do you say let's get it started hi science mike my name is brianna and i wanted to ask you a question about information control and search engines on the internet and especially with how important information has become in our daily lives and structure and the increasing reliance that we put on search engines and particularly google to present uh what we are going to shape as truth or what we are going to consider reality um i started reading this book um that i'm sure you've heard of called algorithms of oppression by sophia umojan noble and um it's just totally blowing my mind right now and a little bit freaking me out and i wanted to ask you if you foresee um a major problem i guess coming um in our society where information is i mean it's already so controlled by these search engines and by the choices that their programmers and algorithms are making um for us but not choices on our behalf and i guess i'm wondering if you see a way out or a way that our society or like we as a group of people as a nation um could change the i don't know the way we use the internet or the way we rely on search engines um to be more democratic somehow and um not uh i don't know giving over our perception of reality and all the power of information into the hands of what are essentially marketing companies um i would just love to hear you talk about it i'm uh feeling pretty dark about the entire internet and all of society right now um and it would be really comforting to hear if there are choices that we can make to i guess change what is happening thank you bye if i didn't know any better i'd think that you were referencing uh my manuscript i'm literally um in the middle of working on uh a chapter about this for my next book uh so your your timing is fortuitous it also means i'm gonna be a little guarded because i don't wanna spill all the beans here and uh you know have nobody want to buy my book because they think they heard it on the podcast so um yeah gosh what is going on with all these machines um and in the interest of honing your question and not messing up my book reveal we will stick strictly to search engines here instead of the larger you know digital economy and information economy that we're in but if we look at search engines zone yeah they have incredible influence over our ability to find information and therefore what we believe but i i do want to say like there's a good skepticism at the heart of your question some genuine and necessary concern i but i want to point out that the influence search engines have on us is not in some way unprecedented in human history the way i find encouragement these days is to remember that all this language all these words being put out into the world throughout human history were put there by primates i'm a primate you're a primate we are not some kind of elevated hyper rational objective you know information beings we are primates trying to survive on earth mainly in social contexts and since words and language have such a capacity create narrative and narrative has an unparalleled capacity to drive human behavior information and narrative have always been weaponized by our species right so maybe search engines are the gatekeepers of today but it's not like pre-internet information gatekeepers were benevolent or without bias propaganda's been around a long time right and when you push ideas that went against the prevailing dogma historically you were maybe even less successful previously than you would be today so there's always been gatekeepers there's always been bias and agendas in the dissemination of information in our species so i want to start there we're not in some historically unprecedented territory what is unprecedented is scale search engines are kind of a necessity given the volume of information created in the world today youtube alone creates far more video content in a 24 hour period then we could reasonably look through even with an army of uh people categorizing and then you'd be introducing human bias like early search engines were human directories where people would categorize websites well guess what you're introducing people's opinions there on what should be categorized under what labels and what those labels should be so what algorithms was they scale up human effort really dramatically and i do think that's necessary but but the scale that comes with algorithmic information curation means that when developers have unconscious bias that gets propagated really quickly and i can think of several examples i can think of uh the difficulty that machine learning systems have in seeing the faces of people of color for example is it any surprise that uh white and asian engineers and and most engineers and silicon valley companies are white and asian and male started with data sets that were also largely white and asian light-skinned people and then you know there's a pr snafu when these issues come to light there was no malice there there was unconscious bias that got scaled up to global scale maybe more concerning to me is the feedback loop between our behaviors and machine learning and how toxic that can become um i started typing why are native americans into google right before i hit record just to see what it would say and it did that autocomplete thing and it said why are native americans alcoholics was the first autocomplete and the second thing was fat well that's one the most popular things the most common words to follow why are native americans so those are genuine points of curiosity but those are genuine points of curiosity that are wildly racist and so then you can imagine if i were um if i had lower information literacy or if i was a young child and i was looking for why are native americans called native americans which would be a reasonable query for a young person to ask um but then i see an auto complete for alcoholics and fat like what what how is my view of a people group now being shaped what do i think about first nations people well and i think they're probably fat alcoholics um and that's really concerning so i haven't read algorithms of oppression but i'm familiar with the concepts behind it um that search engines through amplifying unconscious bias and a feedback loop between our de-socialized curiosities and that are of reinforcement that presentation of information back to us are shaping the way that we view other people they're shaping the way that we view the world and yeah that's concerning it's really concerning and the strategies today if you search why are black women on google it won't auto-complete anything so that engineers are trying to mainly go through and find searches that uh produce these unintended consequences but that's a that's not that that that solution doesn't scale well i don't know what the solution is we get rid of search engines the internet's not really useful um so many people find me by saying um i don't believe god is real now what or can christians be gay right there's these questions that people have that they're afraid to ask in their communities and these non-judgmental machines just say well a lot of other people who had that question clicked here and and this helped you know well the machines don't know if it helped them right that's part of the problem but they know a lot of people click and uh and so i bet many of you listening to my voice right now found me through a search engine so they're not all bad but yeah there's absolutely issues with how they disseminate and amplify information and they do aggregate and concentrate power for these kind of hyper-libertarian folks on the west coast of the united states of america uh what can you do well one you can hold companies accountable there's a reason why you when you type why are black women on google there's no auto complete because people got angry and it was bad pr for google and only by holding these companies feet to the fire on an ongoing basis will change happen and the other thing you can do is use alternatives uh you know we don't want to google search monopoly bing is also run by absolutely massive profitable uh west coast corporation called microsoft you might have heard of them as much as possible i use a search engine called duck duck go because they have some pledges on how they handle privacy and they do less tracking and their business model is more out in the open but they are ultimately a marketing company like google but the lower or less amount of tracking they do make them less able to bring in so many factors into your search history and therefore limit the amount of individualized hyper focus they have on your particular behavior and beliefs so i think of the search engine something like duckduckgo is about as good as it can get right now i would be interested in paying to subscribe to an ad free search engine where the onus is simply on the best search result and not attaching good enough search results to keyword targeting but that's it's not out there to my knowledge although you know there's a lot of nerds who listen to ask science mike so fellow nerds if you know of a better alternative even than duckduckgo for avoiding some of the worst parts of curation via algorithm go ahead and leave them in the comments of this episode it's episode 181 and i'll also have a link to our media literacy episode of the liturgist podcast on the show notes for this week to talk about you know what do we do when search engines feed us garbage in response to our questions [Music] right now my daughter is in the next room building an arcade game literally building an arcade game not an electronic arcade game arcade back in the classical sense before uh all the computers took over she's building a little catapult and a you know scoreboard and uh and building an arcade game that she can play um my older daughter madison is working on an art project which is a a felt fern or a felt succulent garden to decorate her room with neither of them are on their devices and both of them are learning about science technology engineering arts and math through kiwiko a sponsor for ask science mike i love kiwi co they send these crates in the mail and they have projects in them and these projects are highly kinesthetic interactive hands-on ways of learning that children of all ages enjoy and they're going to do something really special for listeners of ask science mike if you go to kiwico.com science they're going to send you a free crate a completely free kiwi crate for you to try with your family we've been subscribers for several months now and we look forward to the post person bringing these cardboard boxes in the mail full of exciting learning opportunities i just can't say enough wonderful things about kiwi co i'm not only thankful to them for sponsoring science mike and therefore making the show possible i love all the pictures that listeners have sent me of their children enjoying learning and setting down their devices so if that sounds good to you go to kiwico.com science for your free crate [Music] our next question this week came in via email and it reads hi mike my deconstruction process really hurt my wife or perhaps it's more fitting to say that i have really hurt my wife in going through the process of deconstruction my deconstruction journey led me to logic and reasoning and i couldn't philosophically or logically resolve many paradoxes i saw in god and in the church you have to understand that i was raised in the church the son of a pastor and seven years ago my wife married what she thought was a strong devout christian who would lead our household in the way of jesus then last year i lost my faith i have since begun the process of rebuilding it but logically i can't let certain ways of thinking and behaving back into my worldview at times this has put me at odds with my wife who holds very firmly to a religious christianity that is incredibly close to her emotional center sometimes i find myself inadvertently preying upon those emotions as we develop into discussions of faith and i feel like a jerk like a bully because of it i act like my pursuit of logic somehow puts me above her primitive understanding of christianity and the way the world works even though that's not at all how i feel or think towards her deep inside i almost feel like spock and if i'm not careful i'm afraid i'll lose my marriage in pursuit of a logical faith my question is clearly the above description is riddled with plot holes and inconsistencies as i strive to unpack this complex tangle of emotion and logic is there any psychological explanation for this spoc syndrome and are there practices i can pursue to begin changing the way i communicate to be more empathetic and compassionate without abandoning logic sincerely timothy well timothy i am so glad that you took the time to write in with your question i know that a lot of people share it because the patrons of ass science mike who have listened to this show a long time and pick the questions every week they voted for your question the most of all the questions that were up for vote this week and i get questions like this a lot so the first thing i would say timothy is you're not alone there's millions of people who are questioning the faith that they grew up with who find great difficulty with the rigor behind christian theology with the plausibility of god or a jesus that walked out of a tomb after three days being dead it's not just you but it might not feel that way because if your dad's a pastor and all of your friends are christians you might feel insecure you might feel like people are judging you and and you might feel like working through these answers logically so you can describe your beliefs and why they're no longer christian is a way for you to protect yourself a way to justify that you still belong that you still matter that you're so worthy of friendship and of love there is i believe an explanation for the spock syndrome so many of us go through as we deconstruct our faith and that explanation psychologically is a phenomenon known as intellectualization an intellectualization is a defense mechanism that our brains use to protect us from difficult feelings i'd imagine that if you grew up in the church your belief in god meant something to you i'd imagine that because you married a christian woman you have a lot of positive memories of life in church which means losing your faith represents real loss and grief and pain and often those of us who grew up in western christianity which highlights rational thought so much are then exposed to skeptical communities which highlight and lift up rational thought even more and we find that the more that we focus on these questions logically and rationally the less our feelings bother us and of course they do the part of the brain responsible for rational thinking requires a lot of energy and so when we use a lot of rational thought our brains use less of their emotional centers in order to let us keep problem solving is it possible timothy that you're in a cycle of intellectualization which in no way minimizes the insights that you've had by the way i only mentioned that there may be a psychological phenomenon a because you asked and b so you can understand that there are psychological factors at play for both you and your wife in this discussion because of course faith traditions are riddled with logical contradictions so are feelings so are human beings faith is a meaning-making tool for our species not a fact-finding one and it's okay for you to leave your faith behind or for your faith to change as you ask questions and it's okay to critique the ways in which faith and religion have been co-opted in harming people but it's not okay to dismiss the very real psychological needs that faith addresses for people including your wife so here's what i'd recommend don't try to win the argument don't even try to have an argument start having conversations that's about sharing with each other and receiving what the other says in non-judgment you might try a style of communication called what i've heard and in what i've heard communication one person gets the opportunity to speak and they get to speak until they're done without interruption and when they're done speaking the other person reflects back what they've heard them say so you'd say so what i'm hearing you say is and then you would simply repeat back everything you heard to your understanding and that gives your spouse an opportunity to say ah no that's not really what i meant let me clarify and then when that happens now you get an opportunity to share what you think and your spouse then says well what i'm hearing is and then you offer correction or or subtlety or nuance that was missed you'll notice this is an argument nobody's right nobody's wrong it's just an opportunity to get your thoughts and your feelings out there to communicate and to start working towards a consensus of living my wife and i have been on radically different spiritual pages for some time now and it's fine because we've learned that at least for us a shared faith experience is not the foundation of our marriage a commitment to living life together supporting each other and caring for each other is the foundation of our relationship timothy you'll need to find out what the foundation of your relationship is what your key shared values are so that you can live into them as you do that i'd like to recommend a couple of resources one is a liturgist podcast episode titled the other side of the mattress it's from way back in season one of the liturgies podcast but i'm on it with my wife jenny my co-host michael gunger and his wife lisa are there and we talk about what deconstruction is like for people in marriage when they're involved in religious community and i'd also like to recommend to you my book finding god in the waves which is all about deconstruction reconstruction finding community finding some understanding of spirituality that we can assent to logically if that's important to us of course finding on the ways it's available at bookstores everywhere or you can go to findinggodonthewaves.com and i don't mean to give you a book pitch in the middle of a very serious question but i put a lot of thought into that and i think it could be helpful to you and again if if you can't afford or don't want to get the book the other side of the mattress which is a podcast on the liturgist podcast is free and available for download anywhere podcasts are available [Music] hey mike i'm a long time listener first time questioner so my question relates to limits on free speech particularly the no platforming movement against the alt-right speaking on university campuses so i have no problem protesting and organizing against the alt-right and i have no problem violently defending marginalized communities against fascists who are trying to attack them my question really relates to when we advocate that these people's right to speech is removed and when we ask universities to uninvite them and keep them from the speaking schedules are we playing into their hands is it really strategic to to begin limiting certain people's right to speech um and is this form of censorship is this just gonna be turned around and used against the left um as soon as it's convenient um so i've been thinking about this a lot and i really go back and forth on the subject um these people's views are so disgusting that my impulse is is really just to want to give them no platform but um but then i think about these other arguments so i'm really interested to hear your thoughts um thanks so much that's a great question and one i see coming up a lot anymore um when is when is censorship good when is censorship bad is it is it too far to no platform people or deny them the right to speak and i think that's where i'd like to start with your question you said when their right to speech is removed and i think that's a key misunderstanding when we talk about no platforming at least from my perspective if someone is not invited to speak somewhere or even if someone is dis invited to speak somewhere that's not the same as taking away their right for speech as i understand it legally in america free speech is the right to speech without government interference that's what free speech protections are about in other words if i want to say something especially something bad about the american government the american government can't take action against me the american government can't jail me for saying i don't approve of its policies or any elected leaders free speech means i can trash talk donald trump all i want and you know my dad can trash talk nancy pelosi and everyone's right to do that is legally protected and i actually do think that's a good and necessary legal protection i am all for free speech but free speech doesn't mean we have the freedom to speak anywhere we please in any venue we choose free speech doesn't give anyone a right to speak on my podcast right you can't knock on my front door and walk into my house and say turn the microphone on i've got something to say on ask science mike because that science mic is my show i choose who gets to be on ask science mike and who doesn't and that's responsibility i actually take pretty seriously also the fact that i have free speech doesn't mean that i can go to atlanta georgia walk into the cnn headquarters and demand to speak on camera because i have free speech that's not what free speech is and so when we talk about free speech and we talk about people's right to it i don't want to conflate access to a speaking platform at a university with free speech that's not what free speech is when we're talking about who gets to talk at universities we're really talking about what we want learning environments to be about like that has nothing to do in my opinion with free speech free speech and freedom of speech is also not about freedom of consequences for speech i can say what i want to but if i say something really inflammatory then sponsors have a right to pull their ad dollars from my show if i say something really horrible then my patrons on patreon have the right to not be a patron anymore my free speech still has consequences and so we talk about the alt-right who are are literally talking about people's right to exist as free citizens in the united states questioning fundamental assumptions of a right to exist that speech has consequences ironically tolerance of intolerance is the quickest way to destroy a tolerant culture we may say that tolerant values mean that we should allow all speech in all venues and on all platforms and people acting in bad faith will use that tolerance to destroy societal tolerance we've seen this happen in history i think it's important even vital as a society to say what speech we will stand for in the public square and what speech that we will not i i won't accept speech questioning the right of people of color to exist i won't accept it in the public square i will push back on that speech including working to deprive that speech opportunity for platforms and i can do that because i'm not the united states government white nationalism simply isn't speech that i want to amplify of course the alt-right has the the legal right and basis to say whatever they wish in media platforms and universities and venues have the right to say not on my platform they have a right to say it but i don't have the obligation to offer them my megaphone to spread it but i think more importantly when we look at things like no platforming and the infamous can we punch a nazi question it concerns me how much of our mind share and conversational share these topics take there are such more fundamental aspects of human justice at question i'm more concerned that there are nazis operating in america today than whether or not people are punching them i'm much more interested in confronting nazism than you know it did because a guy punched a nazi on youtube like is that the major point of our civil discussion i just i can't be bothered i can't be bothered when families are being torn apart i can't be bothered when when so many gay teenagers kill themselves these are just such more important issues in my life and in my heart than whether it's fair to no platform the alt-right or if it's ethical to punch a nazi and i i hope this doesn't come across as like um i think your question was very thoughtful i think your question was very essential uh i i'm glad you asked it i just wish that as a larger macro discussion that these questions took up smaller amounts of our of our energy and our time and why don't all children have access to clean drinking water was a more commonly asked question that's that's what i'm getting at it's not that these questions are bad that they're not important that this kind of civil discourse isn't vital to the health of a society um it's just that i don't want us to get lost in the weeds i mean i i've been going it's been a heck of a year for me it really has and if someone else with less privilege than me had been through the same things i've been through the same medical difficulties the same diagnoses that i've been in the last 12 months they would have been completely economically ruined let's let's ask why we allow that and why we're not using our speech to change it [Music] our last question came in via email and it reads hey mike canada just implemented a carbon tax on april fool's day only time will tell how that will snowball and increase the cost of living i feel it is being poorly implemented in canada because the revenue isn't going to enact a change but to the black hole that is our government spending have you heard of any good implementations of carbon taxing i feel canadians would be more on board if the tax is going to solar power and wind farms even ev charging infrastructure would be great instead it feels like we're being penalized for driving to work and school last summer our family traveled 1100 miles to buy a hybrid vehicle because there were no options in our area as a whole i think people wouldn't mind making a change if there were feasible options well let's start with the obvious that i am not an expert on canadian tax policy and so i'm speaking pretty far out of my expertise on this question [Music] maybe as far out of my expertise as possible i would say that energy policy uh is really hard in this era of climate change anything that you do from a policy perspective that is designed to shift activity towards renewable sources of energy is going to inconvenience people and be unpopular um now when i read about um canada's fuel tax it's a little complicated because i don't know which uh specific act you're talking about there were already some provinces that had carbon taxes in place place and they're exempt to the new policy but the the nationwide policy is called the greenhouse gas pollution pricing act and it's uh it's a way to try to slow down canadian consumption of fossil fuels and yeah the main way most consumers will see that is in the form of a fuel tax um that works out to i don't know 10 10 cents a gallon something like that a 20 cents a gallon i honestly don't know i think it's around 20 cents a gallon and uh then in the future it'll get steeper it'll go to about 40 cents a gallon in the 2020s somewhere okay so that is an immediate fuel uh cost increase you feel it in your pocket immediately now as i understood it the goal with this national carbon tax is to be revenue neutral it's not supposed to increase the amount of revenue available to the canadian government so basically the way it works is the tax that's collected from individuals and businesses anyone buying gas will then be distributed like 90 80 i don't remember some major percentage is supposed to get distributed as a rebate to canadian citizens okay so there is a tax on fuel but it's supposed to get distributed back out so basically this means that industries that use a lot of fuel are going to be a disproportionate amount of the tax then it's going to go back to consumers to then spend elsewhere so it's supposed to hit you in the pocket yes but it's also supposed you're supposed to get most if not all of the money back in a rebate and what that's designed to do is to create an incentive structure where it makes less financial sense for companies to use carbon as part of their business model you know i don't know we're getting deep into policy here we have to do something to curb our energy usage companies represent a disproportionate amount of energy emissions in the services they provide to consumers yes but companies are the major source of pollution and so individual behavioral changes don't drive as much change as quickly as corporations and big companies and institutions making changes and laws like this are designed to do that again i'm not an expert on canadian tax policy but i would look into it a little further and see how the rebate works and if you're eligible for it if there's anything required to be eligible for it and if there is i'd take advantage of that um because you are supposed to get a payout in fact actually here a tweet i see i'll link to this in the show notes this week the cost is broken out per household by province so let's look at ontario for example in 2019 the average household will be hit with 244 dollars in fuel tax which is not insignificant but in 2019 uh should see a incentive payment or a rebate of 300 so this should actually net money in your pocket based on what i'm seeing here in these figures and that actually holds true all the way through 2022 so yeah it's going to come out of your pocket now but then you'll get a rebate or an incentive back and maybe it'll be more popular then i actually think this is an example of a pretty good um a pretty good tax policy now maybe because you have to commute so far you're going to be uniquely impacted so you're going to pay more in tax uh but but you're going to get the same rebate if someone doesn't drive as far and that's actually how these policies work it is designed to penalize more carbon polluting behaviors so doing what you did buying a more fuel-efficient vehicle is your best way to combat it and that's probably by design uh i know it doesn't feel fair i'm not even saying it is fair i'm telling you that your government is trying to make some attempt at making an impact on climate change because it is getting dire and uh yeah i mean um i don't know of actually of any any carbon tax policy that is more consumer friendly than that that the rebate's supposed to return more money than you pay in because companies are getting penalized more heavily than you because they use use more fuel and it's supposed to be revenue neutral but who knows governments say the word revenue neutral a lot don't they [Music] that's another episode of ask science mike in the books thank you so much for listening we've been on a roll the show has been coming out regularly again i want to thank all of my patrons for making that possible um i want to thank greg nordin for his work producing and sound designing science mike thanks andrew golucky for pre-production and uh thanks jeff otiford for that amazing theme song i really appreciate talking to all of you and i can't wait to talk to you again next week [Applause] [Music]