In this monologue, the speaker reflects on how many widely‑accepted beliefs are actually based on unexamined assumptions or cultural biases. She shares personal anecdotes and historical tidbits to illustrate the point: a family’s Valentine’s Day treasure‑hunt tradition was unique yet assumed to be common; the iconic "ribbit" frog sound comes from a specific Pacific‑coastal tree frog used in early movies, not all frogs; carrots are mistakenly fed to rabbits because Bugs Bunny was modeled after Clark Gable, who ate carrots in a 1934 film; the sleeping aid zolpidem was only tested on men, leading to dangerous side‑effects for women; and menstrual products have only recently begun to be tested with real blood rather than surrogate fluids. The speaker argues that such oversights have real impacts in science and medicine and urges futurists to question the knowledge they take for granted. She previews a next episode on the WEIRD sampling bias, which highlights how scientific studies often over‑represent Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic populations, neglecting diverse cultures. The closing call encourages listeners to regularly examine the origins of their beliefs and verify whether they are truly accurate.
Chapters
Today's Musings is about the information that we take at face value without ever really investigating, and then suddenly discover many, many years later that we were wrong. One example is when my first daughter was quite young, we had a foster child with us, and when it came to Valentine's Day, I used to create a Valentine's Day treasure hunt. And so there were little clues around the house. So it was a way for the older girl to play with my younger daughter, and they could uncover the clues and read them and explore. And by the time they got to the end of the treasure hunt, there was a little treasure box with a whole bunch of sweeties in it. And we did that every Valentine's Day for some reason. And then my second daughter came along, and then the 2 girls were in school one day on Valentine's Day, and they said to their friends, What did you get in your Valentine's Day treasure hunt? Only to discover they were the only family who did that because in their frame of reference, that was what happened. So there's a few others. My husband and I love knowing knowledge that the other one doesn't have, but we discovered we both knew these 2 stories the other night. The one is about why the frog in movies goes ribbit. We always talk about it. We teach children to say ribbit for a frog sound, but apparently the frog that says ribbit is specific only to a handful of frog species in the North American Pacific coastal regions called the Baja California tree frog, and that tree frog's sound was used as a background effect in old movies. So all of us around the world thinking that frogs go ribbit because we don't go and listen to frogs and we just assume that what we've seen in the old movies must be true. It would also be a Western bias to that. There's another one. Apparently carrots are really bad for rabbits. They're dangerous. You should never feed a carrot to a rabbit, but we do. Why do we do that? Because Bugs Bunny, the iconic rabbit that we all grow up with, he's always chewing on a carrot. And the only reason Bugs Bunny was chewing on a carrot is because the producers of that cartoon modeled Bugs Bunny on Clark Gable, and apparently Clark Gable's in a 1934 movie called It Happened One Night. His character was eating a rabbit. No, no, his character was eating a carrot. So all of us assume— we, we like make toys, stuffed toys of rabbits with their carrots, and all of it based on some person who just said, hey, why doesn't Bugs look like Clark Gable? That's a great idea. And then they work it in and a whole Generations of people lose the reason why we actually do something, why we believe something, and and we end up taking that on when it's completely and utterly incorrect. That's amusing, but it has impacts. It has a lot of impacts in in in science and in medicine. A very unfortunate one I heard about was a medication called zolpidem, which it's a sleeping aid, and all the drug tests which the United States of America's Food and Drug Administration. administration require all of the tests done, uh, were on men. They hadn't tested them on women. They hadn't tested them on, on people with, um, smaller frames and who weighed less than the men that they tested on. And that drug stayed in the person's system for so long that it would cause, and, you know, implications 24 hours after they'd even taken the medication. So when this first came to light, it was because a woman, um, had taken the medication the night before and the next day she was in a car accident and she seemed to be totally drugged. And it was because this drug was still in her system and the FDA had never required tests for it. There's another one in the news at the moment that scientists only now in 2023, 2024 are starting to test menstrual products with blood as opposed to red water. For the first time, they're actually using the proper fluid for the test. So how does this impact us as futurists? It impacts us because we need to question the knowledge that we think we have. This is not about turning everything into a conspiracy theory, but it is about saying how much of what we automatically assume to be true is actually correct, or where did it come from, or why do we have these frameworks, biases, assumptions about how the world works? Why? And are they only kind of nuanced to our part of the world? Are we looking at things that are not uncovering information and results and insights that we should have for other parts of the world? In our next Musings, we'll look at a concept called WEIRD, which is an acronym for how people test in scientific tests in order to get information. And it's usually with a certain kind of group who are covered by this acronym called WEIRD, which means that we're missing anything in African cultures, Eastern cultures, um, illiterate cultures, uh, cultures with different kinds of languages and profiles and religions. And we're assuming that the whole world works like this when it's really only a small weird group of people. So first off, um, just let your children know that they shouldn't feed their bunnies any carrots. Um, check your medication to make sure that it's relevant for who you are and, uh, not just for, you know, big tough guys. And then just gently every day step back just for a moment and look at what you're saying, what you're automatically responding to, what you automatically believe to be true, and say, where did I get that information from? Is it true? Is it real? Can I uncover it? Do I need to question it deeper than this momentary observation? Do I need to change how I think about something or how I respond to something because my information could be wrong? That's our challenge for the future, and we'll continue this musing next time.
