Episode 253: Tarkovsky's Starchild

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 Tamela Summers from the University of Houston. Dave for the last two years, I've been convinced against all reason, that I couldn't get COVID. And I talked a lot of shit. And it became part of how I understood myself, like what I took myself to be. But I got it last week and now I have to reconstruct a whole new identity for myself. What should it be? What should I be?

Well, it's going to take a lot of soul searching. I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm a COVID version, too. And now I feel like you're not part of the club.

I know.

I feel a little bit more distance between us.

I don't blame you. I've let you down. I've let all the people who never got it down did it feel like.

A weird moral failure? I feel like it's just like for no reason, no good reason, it feels like a moral failure.

It felt like a failure of will. And I had been saying, because my wife got it, my daughter got it, and I never got it, and they were in my house and I just would tell people I'm made of sterner.

Stuff.

Which is clearly not true when it comes to my wife anyway, and also probably my daughter, but whatever. And then I would say that I had too strong a will to get COVID and it all just came crashing down on me.

Every once in a while, I find some reason to believe in a God who punishes that sort of hubris.

The next thing that's going to happen is I'm just going to get into a bike accident with a head injury that the doctor, for whatever reason, is certain that a helmet would have prevented.

You're going to be like a little monkey from Stalker.

Oh, man. Yes. So today, this is it. This is what I've been wanting for a long time. We're finally going to do an episode on Andre Tarkovsky's Stalker.

Not even COVID could hold you back.

Not even COVID. Well, it held us back one, so I'm very excited. If a bit nervous about that, you.

Get a particular way by the way, you do get this nervousness about talking about your favorite stuff, like, we're going to fail at doing it in some way or another.

Do you feel that way sometimes?

I don't like anything that much, no? Yeah, but I don't think as much as you. I feel like I have faith in our abilities.

Oh, I'm confident. But if it doesn't go well, here's.

The thing, you have to edit it. And so I feel like you have more of a sensibility to it and I kind of trust you to polish our turds.

I will try to make sense of what we end up saying. But first we have a gem of a psychology paper from I think I first saw it from Neurosceptic. Who else?

Who I don't know what he does to find these things. Does he have Google alerts for keywords.

Or like a whole team of people? That's how I like to imagine it, that he has this team of people that are scouring to try to find.

So the the paper is called Small Penises and fast cars. Evidence for a psychological link. And it is by researchers out of University College London in the department of Experimental A.

That is obviously like a real place.

It is, I've been there. But it's a doozy. It's a doozy of a paper. It's a preprint. So I don't think it's been accepted for publication anywhere. And I'm going to treat this like open science, like we're peer reviewing this for them.

But as I said to you off air, this paper should be published, it should be seen, and it shouldn't have to go through the humiliation of a peer review process like nature, just like accept.

I really have questions about how you even start with this, but I'll just describe the gist of it. It's a pretty simple experiment. It's one experiment. And the idea was that they wanted to see if there was a link between men feeling like they had a small dick and them liking sports cars, which is whatever. It's like the trope. They're basically studying a joke that's been around since like the something. And the way that they did it was to experimentally manipulate what they told men. The average penis size was with the idea that if I tell you that the average penis size is, whatever, eight inches, then on average you probably are smaller than that. So they will make you feel inferior and you'll like the sports car. So they would present in this study, they presented a whole bunch of facts of which one of them embedded in that was a fact about penis size. Half the people got like a way bigger than average and half the people got way smaller than average. They either felt good about their penis size or they felt terrible about their penis size. And then they were told they were going to rate products and so they rated a whole bunch of products. So the key for their hypothesis the key was the prediction that if they were told that penises were bigger than they actually are, they would rate the sports cars more favorably.

Yeah.

So they do a review of the literature and the literature it's all about sexual selection stuff like triver stuff, basically arguing that men go the route of conspicuous consumption to attract females, especially for short term mating goals, to compensate if.

They have low self esteem of some kind.

So they do a review and then this paragraph how does penis size fit into this theoretical picture? The hypothesis would be that males who feel poorly endowed associate that with being less attractive to females. They would seek to compensate for their disadvantaged primary sexual characteristic with an increased show of secondary sexual characteristics, the conspicuous consumption of a sports car. We tested this hypothesis with an experimental manipulation. First of all, I don't know if they're being cheeky, but a sports car is not a secondary sexual character. I don't know what they're talking about. It's just weird. Like I said before, it's like a stale joke turned into a hypothesis involving evolutionary psychology, which they also had a bunch of other product ratings, including luxury items like Rolex watches and stuff. And they really don't give any reason why this shouldn't work for other luxury goods. Presumably they talk about the peacock and its fancy tail feathers and it's like, what in humans? It's just the specific effect of a sports car. Which leads me to my big problem with the paper, which I don't believe the finding because not only is it only an effect for penis size on sports cars and they have other low self esteem manipulations and other luxury goods, they don't get any effect there. But it's also completely split up by age in order to find the effect in a way that's just all right. They were just looking to see how they get so they split men into like 29 and under and whatever older than 29, which is always a red flag unless that shit is pre registered. It's just like, why 29? Why split in half? They're just sort of fishing for it. So they show that this only works for older men, but not for younger men. Again, with no good reason.

So you're accusing them of pee hacking.

I am accusing them of pee hacking. Why are they doing I just don't understand. Why do this?

I feel like this is something you do and a lot of psychologists do, is you have a paper here with so many fundamental problems that suggest that your whole discipline is unserious, and yet you pick something that's fairly that's absolutely right but doesn't get to the bottom of. How about this? The measure for whether you think you have a big penis or not is that you read this random fact. I guess in their mind you're thinking, wait