Episode 220: On Your Marx

I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination. It's communist subversion and the international communist conspiracy to SAP and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

The great and hot has spoken. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Who are you? Who are you? A very bad man. I'm a very good man. Good man. They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man. Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to very bad wizards. I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, the baby from the COVID of Nirvana's Nevermind is suing the record company and the Cobain estate for engaging in child pornography. You're the judge. What's your verdict?

Damn.

Did you know about this?

Yeah, I remember the first time I saw that cover, right. And I thought to myself, that baby's not going to be happy when they're grown up, that their little dick was just out there for the world to see. Now I think it's absolutely ridiculous to call it child pornography. And the fucking guy over the years has taken so many pictures of himself in that same position, like banking off of his fame that way, that it's just slimy to call it child porn.

To back up a second, you said the baby with his little dick. Do you mean little just because he's a baby or even taking into account that he's a baby? And how do you know the size of most babies dicks?

I don't know how much variability there is in baby dick. Yeah. But I will say this. I had a girl, so I have not seen a lot of baby dick. But I do remember a good friend of mine has had two boys. And I saw both boys as babies. And he was a good enough friend that I was there all the time while he was changing them. And one of them was just hung as a baby.

This is very weird and disturbing.

He was a hung baby? Yeah. The other one, I think it was evident even back then.

Do you now know that as adults that pattern has held?

I think when they were teenagers, my friend told me that that pattern held. Like he was laughing about when they had to take showers together. Like it was evident.

This whole thing is very weird and I wish I hadn't brought it up because you're telling me that you were, like always over your friend's house, looking at two sons penises and then also that you verified when they were teenagers and his dick was way bigger than Bobby's little Johnny's dick.

Maybe. I have to admit, I've just made all of this up.

Sure. By law, you have to say that. Your attorney just texted you to say that.

But no, I was referring to his small baby dick. Qua baby.

Getting back to that. Yeah, I think that's right. I don't think there's any way to know whether that was a large or small baby dick.

No, but don't you think it's slimy for him to be suing?

Yeah, well, yes. And also the fact that if he should sue anybody, it's his parents for that's right. Rejecting him. Sexual slavery.

He was alienated, actually.

Yeah. So today we're going to talk about, in just an impossible task that we've set for ourselves, carl Marks, two pieces from Karl Marx, and also Engels, who just kind of never gets any credit.

But never gets it's. Like when people say Tamler Summers and his co host David Pizarro.

Yeah, no, it is a really good analogy, actually, because I think you play the role that Engels plays for Marks. No, but so we're going to talk about the Communist Manifesto and then one of his early writings, estranged labor or alienated labor, both of which I think have a lot to offer. Yeah. But in the first segment, we're going to talk about something that I'm honestly kind of impressed that you are willing to talk about because you have a personal connection to it, and that is this recent scandal in the social sciences where it turned out that there's fraudulent data in a 2012 study about dishonesty. Ironically, as every single person talking about it has pointed out, the irony of that, that there was fraudulent data and that one of the authors and the author most connected to the data itself is a former guest of the podcast and friend of yours, Dan Arielli. We had some people asking us if we're going to talk about it. And yeah, like I said, I'm impressed that you're willing to talk about it. I don't know how you want to frame the conversation. How do you?

Yeah, I'll just start by summarizing sort of what happened. So the blog Data Colada, which is run by three social psychologists who are also data sleuths great blog recommended they, along with some people who didn't want to be named, posted this blog post uncovering what are pretty damning facts about the data in this study in 2012 Now, the study in 2012 was really influential. It was a study purporting to show that if you sign something first, like an honor statement first, and then you engage in some sort of behavior in which you could cheat, that you'd be less likely to cheat than if you sign something afterwards saying that you were being honest. The classic example is tax. At the end of when you get your taxes done, you have to say, like, I promise that none of this that I reported this accurately. And so the hypothesis was that if you first asked them, like, I promise that I will report this accurately, that it would cut down on cheating. And so this paper had three studies, two lab studies and one field study. And it's the field study that was revealed to be fraudulent, at least some of the data being fraudulent. Now, the field study was in collaboration with an insurance company that wasn't named in the original paper. And the finding was that when people had to report the number of miles they had driven after a certain amount of time, that because driving more miles leads to higher insurance rates. The finding was apparently that people who signed first some honesty statement would be more honest in reporting their mileage and that would result in there being more miles driven in the sign first condition than in the sign after condition.

Because presumably they're all likely to drive, on average, the same number of miles. The two groups.

Exactly. Like random yeah. Randomly between those two groups. That should happen. Now, it turns out that in 2020, the authors of the original paper, including Dan Arielli, who is the one sort of most implicated in this, tried to replicate the original studies and failed and published a paper saying that they tried and failed, and they posted all of the original data from their 2012 study. And this is where the data was found to be fraudulent. The way that it was found to be fraudulent was like, in a really silly, silly way. If you take the difference between time sorry, miles driven at time one and miles driven at time two, which was supposed to show this difference, there was an equal distribution of all miles. So people were reporting that they were equally so people were equally as likely to have driven 5000 miles as they were to have driven 10,000 miles. 2030, 40

Okay?

Which is just super duper implausible. Right? Like that just can't and probably mathematically impossible. So that is just really implausible. And it turns out that there was good reason to think that some of the values of the time 2 miles