Transcript
David McRaney (0:00)
If you could hear love, what would it sound like? Son, can we talk about your drinking? Yeah Dad, I think we should helping those closest to you think about their excessive drinking.
Charles Duhigg (0:23)
Maybe that's what love sounds like. More@rethinkthedrink.com an OHA initiative.
David McRaney (0:30)
You can go to kittedkitted shop and use the code smart50 smart50 at checkout and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out. Middle of the show welcome to the you Are not so Smart podcast, episode 305 hey there. This is the you Are not so Smart podcast. I am your host, writer, producer, editor and all the rest. David McRaney. Perhaps one day I will add some staff, but for now this is still a one person operation and because of that, when I must head out of town like I must do this week, I will sometimes play a previous episode of the program, which is what this episode will be. The next episode after this will be a deep dive into the latest research into both the illusion of objectivity and something called Concordance over Truth Bias. You will hear from three researchers whose latest paper found that for all people, regardless of education or reasoning ability or political allegiance, resistance to true news that paints your side in a bad light is stronger than susceptibility to fake news that paints your side in a positive light. In other words, people tend to believe in fake news that confirms their political beliefs over true news that disconfirms them. And you may have been suspecting that for a while, but there's been a debate in psychology about this. There's been a back and forth between people who do not think this is how it works and people who do. And now we have evidence that it is the the way we'd wish it did. The bad the bad thing. We have evidence for the bad thing that will be a new episode, and the next episode after that will also be a new episode. We sit down with a psychologist who studies our fascination with mentalism and and our tendency to believe in things like facilitated communication, something that has recently grown in mega popularity despite the fact that it was debunked a long time ago. Right now, though, I am headed to Orlando to give a lecture before the Free Thought community, which I'm very much looking forward to. So this episode will be one we ran about a year ago with my friend Charles Duhigg, who wrote a book titled Super Communicators, which I consider to be a blood relative of my book How Minds Change. And thanks to that, the resulting conversation reflects our shared obsessions with this topic. So that's what I'm about to play. I just wanted to open the show with a brief update. Lots of fascinating new stuff is on its way and you can support this one person operation Help Keep Me making New Things by heading over to Patreon. And if you do that and pitch in at any amount you get the show ad free. But at higher amounts you get all sorts of neat stuff. Links to all of that in the show notes. And now on with the episode. I want to begin by telling you a story from the history of psychology and the history of NASA. Yes, the two are intertwined, which is surprising. Was surprising to me. The history of sending humans into space, into the moon includes a lot of psychology. And like everything else that NASA has done, the things they learn scientifically during the space program, the engineering, the technology, and the things they learned about how to best prepare the human mind for going up into space, all of that would later be applied somewhere to an aspect of modern life today. You have used something, some piece of technology or some sort of standard around human behavior or wellness or team building or how to properly investigate whether someone is a good candidate for a position, all these things. Our understanding was accelerated by that space program. We learned a lot of stuff attempting to put people in space and on the moon. Which brings me to this story that I just love. Okay, lets tell the story. In 1958, in October, in response to Sputnik, the Soviet Union's first successful launch of an artificial satellite into orbit, NASA began operations in the United States. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Cold War was on. And now as part of that Cold War, the space race had begun. And it was clear that both Russia and the United States wanted to put human beings in space. Eventually fruit flies and then dogs, then primates, they had all sacrificed their lives. Human beings did that. And scientists from that period, the records are full of regret, discussion of the ethics, the suffering. Was all of this worth it to make sure that when we put people up there, they would not also sacrifice their lives. So in the United States, when it came time to look for human beings to go into space, there was a lot of discussion about how do we make sure that these are the most extraordinary human beings we can find. I don't want to proceed without mentioning and acknowledging that it wasn't a pursuit of the absolute most extraordinary human beings they could find because they limited their pool to just men, white men. That was the era, 1940s, 1950s, a lot of gender biases, a lot of racism. So in that first round of potential astronauts, no women, no people of color, which is unfortunate to say the least. That's not true of today's astronaut pool, including the people who are going on the Artemis mission. Much more diversity. But wasn't like that 1950s, by the way. The first woman to go to space was a cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. It would be nearly 20 years before another woman would go to space. Another cosmonaut, Svetlana Savitskaya, 1982. And in the United States, the first woman astronaut to go to space was Sally Ride, 1983. The first African American astronaut in space was guion S. Bluford Jr. Also in 1983. We'll get back to the 80s in a second. A lot of things were happening there. But back to the original pursuit for potential astronauts, back in the very beginning. And I say potential because that's the words they were using, potential because the scientists that consulted NASA and the scientists that consulted the scientists that consulted NASA and the scientists that worked at NASA, we're talking like engineers, doctors, biologists, physicists, they were all imagining some kind of superhumans. Because all sorts of things could go wrong. And all sorts of things had to go right. And that's just to survive the launch, much less make it into orbit, make it back. And the moon might not even be possible. So the kinds of individuals they were looking for, they had to admit, also might not be possible. Here are the requirements. They had to be test pilots, people who could handle high stress situations and operate experimental aircraft and could be trained on new kinds of aircraft. They had to be a specific height to fit into the spacecraft. Not too tall, but also not too short, so they could reach all the things they needed to reach. They had to be under 40 years old and in incredible physical condition. They needed to be educated, particularly in engineering. And they needed to have very high IQs, with very robust problem solving abilities. And they must be psychologically stable as defined by that era. No bad habits, no mental issues. These were the standards in the beginning. But things changed by the 1970s. The next class of astronauts, much more diversity, many new specialities. Clearly, going into the 1980s, lots of things were changing at NASA. NASA wasn't just expanding who could become an astronaut. They were refining the qualifications, the requirements, the things they tested for to determine if a person was truly extraordinary, at least in the ways they needed a person to be extraordinary, to complete missions into Space to the moon or wherever a rocket might take them. And that's where the story goes Next. Because in 1984, Ronald Reagan, the President, ordered NASA to send people to a space station. The space station was a big deal because now you could do all sorts of research that you couldn't do on these missions that had to go up, do the thing, come right back, you could stay in space for a while. And because these new astronauts would be spending so much time in space, like up to a year in space, in tight quarters and in the company of only a handful of other astronauts, they wanted to make sure that in addition to being incredibly smart, educated, specialized, physically fit, amazing at problem solving, capable of handling high stress situations, highly competent at operating complex machinery, stable, brave, resilient, they also had to be not assholes.