Let's Agree To Disagree Better

Plus: smelly mummies, monstrous celebrities and more.

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a science-enthusiastic newsletter that actively encourages you to call its author an idiot. (Seriously, go do that. Thanks!)

Today we’re catching up on a few stories related to previous editions, and introducing something brand new that’s been on my mind for a while.

Let’s chuck ourselves right in.

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It was the 116th International Women’s Day last Saturday - and however much it’s worth arguing that every damn day of the year should be an opportunity to yell about achievements by women in a world that still has gender pay gaps and widespread under-representation, very much including in the sciences…well, I figure any excuse is worth using.

For example - a few years back I wrote about the brain-knotting delights of the Ames window, created by scientist Adelbert Ames Jnr. Thanks to

Valorie Castellanos Clark

, I later learned the full story of his extraordinary sister Blanche - botanical artist, inventor, political cartoonist and women’s rights advocate, fiercely campaigning for the right for women to have access to birth control to a male-dominated legislature that absolutely wouldn’t hear a word of it:

#32 - Blanche Ames Ames

(I later got on a call with Valorie to discuss Blanche and her legacy - you can listen to it here. And I suggest you go plunder Valorie’s archives - or read the book she’s made of all the fascinating stories she dug up.)

The role of women in the history of modern science is often one of overshadowed achievements, casually stolen credit and all the ugly repercussions of thoughtless sexism - like the way pioneering geologist Marie Tharp couldn’t complete her mapping of the floor of the Atlantic without help from her colleague Bruce Heezen, because at the time the US Navy prohibited women sailing on research ships.

This is a good month to learn something you never knew about the work of a world-changing woman scientist (and this is a good place to start).

If you’re wanting an appropriate soundtrack for doing that, try the work of Belgian-Cameroonian singer/songwriter and Kora player Lubiana, who is currently making waves with this utterly gorgeous piece from her latest album after it went viral on TikTok and Instagram:

“Farafina Mousso” means “African woman” in Bambara. (Discovery hat-tip to

Alejandro Graciano

.)

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Here’s something to add to my recent open thread of ideas and behaviours for getting through hard times:

Splash some cold water on your face!

I know, I know: who would have guessed, everyone please give a round of applause for the completely bleedin’ obvious, and so on.

But does everyone know the science behind it? Not this idiot! 🙋 So I’m grateful to

Andrew Smith

for tipping me off about what’s known as the Mammalian Dive Reflex, which you can activate with a faceful of icy water:

“You’re thinking: that seems paradoxical! After all, cold water tends to wake you up and irritate you, not calm you down. What’s going on here?

All around your nostrils and eyes, there are special receptors that you can trigger with cold water. These receptors can cause your heart rate to slow down considerably, which can involuntarily calm you down a bit.”

As John Rennie at Scientific American notes, a 1978 study found this calming effect is relatively mild in humans, lowering their heart-rate by around 10% - but that’s still enough for us to feel and to benefit from.

So how does that apply to keeping your face stuck in cold water? Since I know fellow newsletter-writer

Anna Brones

is currently writing a book about “our cultural, historical and scientific relationship to low temperatures”, I hope she’ll have a lot to say about it at some point.

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Now here’s something I’ve never considered: what do ancient Egyptian mummies smell like?

My imagination certainly wants to say a lot of things here, broadly categorised under the phrase “hell nope”. But in fact I’d be - as it were - dead wrong:

“If you were asked to describe the scent emanating from an ancient Egyptian mummy like you’d discuss a high-end perfume or the bouquet of a fine wine, you might mention fragrance notes of old linen, pine resin and citrus oils—with just a whiff of pest repellent…

Can we expect to grab a bottle of mummy perfume from the museum shop soon? The researchers say this might not be off the table.”

- from “What Sniffing Mummies Taught Scientists about Ancient Society” by Gayoung Lee, Scientific American.

(That was via my friend Doug Mack, who normally specialises in writing about snacks so I have no idea how he found this story and I am never, ever asking him what he was searching for. Doug, thanks and also no thanks.)

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If you remember a previous newsletter about how staring at your own reflection can turn you into a monster, here’s a fun/horrifying follow-up: it turns out that staring at celebrities turns them into monsters!

No, this isn’t lazy social commentary - it’s science.

Give it a go:

It’s called the Flashed Face Distortion Effect - and since it seems to work equally well upside-down, I guess it’s probably not as simple as another version of our pareidolia visual bias that can make the Thatcher Effect such an alarming “yikes!” when we see it in action?

Anyway, super weird and unsettling! (Thanks, Jason Pargin - I kind of hate it too.)

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Okay, to today’s main event. Let’s talk about an awful conversation I recently had.

A few weeks ago on one of the big social media platforms (not Twitter, I don’t use that anymore), someone took offence to my newsletter about unusual cloud formations.

The exchange went something like this:

THEM: You do know that clouds don’t exist, right?

ME: Uh?

THEM: They’re government-controlled biological agent clusters, targeting towns and cities.

ME: Sorry, are you responding to me? About clouds?

THEM: Yes, you! Newsletter boy. Clouds aren’t real. Delete your thread.

ME: Clouds…aren’t real?

THEM: Obviously.

ME: You mean you can’t see clouds?

THEM: I can see what you think are clouds. Everyone can. But they’re not clouds! Do you know why? Because they’re WHITE! And GREY! And water is colourless!!! Right?

ME: That’s a truly incredible line of reasoning.

THEM: I KNOW, RIGHT? So they’re obviously fake. If they were made of water vapour, they’d be transparent so we couldn’t see them! I mean, clouds obviously do exist - I did science at school and I’m not stupid - but they must be invisible, which logically means what we see isn’t a cloud. It’s a chemical weapon, put there by the globalists to control us.

ME: Why are you so sure of this?

THEM: Because I’ve done my research.

Anyone who writes about science will encounter stuff like this at some point. It’s inevitable.

And what it can become, if you can muster the energy, is an exercise in two people cordially exploring a topic together in an open-minded way, for the good of everyone, including members of the public reading along.

And hey, there is a really interesting question to explore here: why are clouds so white (and so grey)?

What it usually becomes, though, is a waste of everyone’s time, unless both sides are approaching the conversation with the right attitude.

I could have said I planned to write about it so thanks for the suggestion - or I could have referred them to an expert on the topic like

Jason Anthony

, and made them someone else’s problem. (Sorry, Jason.)

Unfortunately, I chose to respond like this:

ME: That’s complete and utter bollocks. LOL. 😂😂😂

And here was their reply:

THEM: You’re a fucking loser and I hope Trump has you arrested.

So that went super-well! (I guess they didn’t see I live in Scotland.)

In this case, I doubt I could have responded in a different way to steer this person in a radically different direction. It sounded like they’d already made their mind up, and they were spoiling for a fight about it, in that breathtakingly pointless way that social media encourages in all of us.

(Also, I’m only presuming it was a person - since their profile was anonymous, and since at least one big company is already experimenting with AI-driven character accounts, no way of really knowing! Such is the tedious horror of online arguments.)

But all this got me thinking. What is the right way to have these kinds of discussions, when they seem genuinely worth having and it feels safe to do so?

And how can you steer someone away from a really deranged-sounding idea, back towards established facts around it, without having them metaphorically go for your throat?

For every recent season of my newsletter, I’ve been running a special mini-series of posts just for paid subscribers. (The last one was on memory, and started here, with a post I’ve since unlocked for everyone.)

But for Season 7, I wasn’t sure what to do. The news… is just a lot, right now. As much as I intend this publication to be a foolish yet engrossing distraction from All That Stuff, and a reminder that there’s a boundlessly interesting world out there that’s worth fighting for - well, this time, could I do something a bit more…useful? (Not “tyranny of usefulness” useful, but a bit more relevant and timely?)

Considering the fanatically polarised nature of so much in my social feeds right now, what could I learn - and pass along to you - about creating curious, mutually respectful conversations about even the most inflammatory topics, and maybe even helping change a few minds along the way? How do the professionals handle this stuff, and what can I borrow from them?

Here are a few personal working hypotheses that I haven’t yet been persuaded out of as I’ve blundered through the world for the last 50-ish years:

• Most people agree on a lot more than they disagree on - meaning that most of us are, very broadly speaking, standing on the same side of the fence on a lot of things, even if we’re unaware of it. (And if that’s true, we certainly are unaware of it, partly due to the way social tech has amplified our differences and incentivized negativity.)

• Trying to change someone’s aggressively forceful & critically unexamined opinion with your own equally aggressively forceful & critically unexamined opinion…either does nothing, or it pushes everyone apart a bit further. Unfortunately and unhelpfully, it still feels like it’s moving the needle, especially on social media where it gets lots of Likes & shares. But behind the scenes, everyone just gets more entrenched. You might as well yell “LET’S FIGHT HARDER!”

• Going into a debate with someone unwilling to change their mind on anything is a waste of everyone’s time. This applies to all sides of that debate, including our own. Everyone has to be genuinely flexible.

• Nobody will ever change my mind with a link to a 6-hour-long YouTube video. (That’s in my case! Your mileage may vary. But for me, it speaks to a wider problem, which is weaponizing burden of proof by burying someone under far, far too much “research” for them ever be able to work their way through. Essentially, an intellectual DDOS attack.)

• Because we’ve got so used to constructing our social identities around our opinions, asking someone to change their mind can sound like an attack on the very core of their being. This is one of the great tragedies of 21st-Century life. (It’s also occasionally a source of great hilarity. But mostly it’s a tragedy.)

• Far too many online ‘debates’ are bad-faith sea-lioning, and therefore worthless - except as self-marketing exercises under the cynical guise of open discourse.

• The only way to have a curious discussion (instead of a bad-faith debate) is for all sides to be willing to change their minds if they’re confronted with compelling enough evidence to shift their opinions accordingly.

• Because of the previous point, creating a truly curious discussion is really, really, really, really freaking hard. And supremely uncomfortable. You might as well say, “Hey, fancy electrocuting yourself for a while?”

• We would probably rather electrocute ourselves than examine our own opinions. There may be some truth in this.

• I usually feel very, very tired when I have to think about all this stuff. I’d like to feel less tired, please? I know there’s coffee, but that feels like cheating. Ta.

So, from next week, alongside the rest of this season, I’m starting a new paid-readers-only series, exploring how we can have difficult conversations with people who disagree with us - and I’m starting with the pioneering work of journalist Mónica Guzmán, who I previously wrote about here.

If you’re a free reader and you want in, you can sign up to become a paid subscriber by clicking below:

This should be great fun, and I can’t wait.

(And if it isn’t, and everyone ends up violently disagreeing with me, at least I don’t have any more hair to pull out.)

Cheers!

Mike

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Images: Alena Darmel; Mathew Schwarz; Pixabay; Chris Sabor.