Questions and Answers: Volume 40

Podcast Transcript

March is upon us. Here in the northern hemisphere, the days are getting longer, temperatures are getting warmer, and people are about to go nuts over college basketball for several weeks.

There is an old saying that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. That might be true, but I tend to think that March comes in like a question and goes out like an Answer.

Stay tuned for the 40th installment of Questions and Answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Let’s start with the first question, which comes from Dave Hudson on Patreon, because membership has its privileges. He asks,

Hi Gary, long-time member of the completionist club, I love this show. Thanks so much for my daily dose of great knowledge! My question is – are there any alternatives to the format of college debate? I remember seeing a story about it (I think it was 60 Minutes), and I was shocked at the speed. I understand the concept that it is about the number of points the debater can make. My question is, are there any other debate societies in college or beyond that focus more on a measured approach that scores based on the quality of the argument as opposed to the quantity?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, academic debate at its highest level is a very fast-paced activity. For most of my debate career, in both high school and college, I was first affirmative and second negative. The first affirmative constructive, the first speech in a debate round, is the easiest as it is scripted. The first affirmative rebuttal is usually considered the hardest speech in a debate round, as you are responding to 12 to 15 minutes of arguments in just 4 or 5.

As such, you have to talk very fast. Likewise, knowing their advantage, the negatives might try to speak quickly and put forward many arguments to cause problems for the first affirmative.

So, that was me. Like everyone else, I had to learn to speak very, very quickly, at a rate that most people probably couldn’t comprehend unless they were trained to listen at those rates.

My college debate coach was Scott Nobles, who was the very first National Debate Tournament champion in 1947. When I was debating in the late 80s and early 90s, I asked him how this style of debate developed, as he had been around for the entire history of the activity by then.

He said it started in the late 1960s. The team most notable for the style, known as spreading, was a team from the University of Houston, known as the “men in black” because they always dressed in black. So, this style has been around for over half a century.

Needless to say, not everyone liked this. In the 1980s, an attempt was made to create an alternative form of debate called Lincoln-Douglas Debate or LD, in high school. It was one person instead of two people, and the intent was for debaters to talk more slowly.

However, LD soon fell into the same habits as two person debate, known as policy debate.

In the early 2000s, another form of debate, called public forum debate, was developed. Public forum was similar in structure to policy debate, except that the speeches were shorter, the topics changed more frequently, and, most importantly, the debate rounds were judged by lay people from outside the activity, not by professionals within it.

As such, it remains much slower-paced.

In college there is a format called parliamentary debate, which is more akin to public forum, and it has been around a while.

That being said, the speed at which debaters talk is not a reflection of the quality of their arguments. It is still usually the quality of an argument that will win.

Niels from the Discord server asks, In team sports, there’s a lot of special positions, knuckleball pitcher, long snapper, place kicker, etc. What is your favorite niche position and why? Seeing I’m from Denmark, the place kicker in football holds a high place in my heart. Thank you for a great podcast. I was delighted to hear your episode on the evacuation of the Danish Jews during World War II. Regards from elite platinum status member Niels from Aalborg, Denmark

It has to be the long snapper, because it is such a waste of a roster spot on a football team. While you certainly want someone who can long snap, it is a skill that could and should easily be developed by anyone who plays the position of center.

It is a single movement that can be practiced over and over at any time. It doesn’t require any special physical attributes that the center wouldn’t already have. If you can develop the skill, it just makes you that much more valuable to any team.

Kevin O’Keefe from the Facebook groups asks, Gary, How do you use AI in your research now, and how do you know if your sources are accurate? Just very curious how you evaluate all the information you’re getting from the internet in terms of what sources are more accurate than others?

There were many AI-related questions, and I’ll try to address them all here.

As most of you know, I use AI to create the cover art for many episodes. This is because certain topics don’t have any images available, or the topics are so broad that it is difficult to find an image to represent them.

I’ve had people complain about this and have said that I should hire humans to create it. That will never happened. I’ve worked with many graphic designers in my life, and the process of getting custom artwork would take days at a minimum, if not weeks, and cost at least hundreds of dollars per image.

Both the budget and time constraints render that impossible for this show. If I couldn’t use AI images, I just wouldn’t use cover art for episodes.

I use AI as tool to understand things better. I use it as a tutor, a topic I’ll be addressing in my book, which I am working on.

For example, I’ve been working on an episode about quantum computers. Before I do the quantum computing episode, I feel that, on a scale of 1 to 10, I have to understand it at a 6 or 7 level to do an episode that explains it at a 4 or 5 level.

The beauty of using AI is that you can ask it questions about anything you don’t understand. No question is too dumb.

I’ve also used it to solve things I couldn’t find. I could swear I once read a quote by President James Monroe about the ‘tyranny of space’, that being the vast overland distances in the United States were a huge problem. I asked an AI agent where the quote came from, and it couldn’t confirm it. It was probably just my imagination and the Mandela Effect.

Likewise, I had an episode idea about the five laws of stupidity, which I had read were attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Again, no matter how much I searched, I couldn’t find a source. When I asked an AI agent, it told me that it wasn’t Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it was actually the Italian economist Carlo Cipolla.

Mystery solved.

I’ve had some weird comments over the last month, in which people have accused me of using an AI voice to create the podcast. Those of you in the completionist club who remember me recording episodes while I was almost hoarse from a bad cold might chuckle. But it has gotten to the point where anything posted online can be accused of being generated by AI, and I’m not sure how you can prove a negative.

I’ve used Grammarly for over ten years and have used it on every episode since episode one. It was just software that was a glorified spelling and grammar checker, but now they claim it is powered by AI. I don’t know how much of what it does is actually AI or if it is just marketing.

I’m also working on an episode about artificial intelligence, but it is such a rapidly changing field its hard to pin down. I’m looking at installing an AI agent called Open Klau on one of my spare computers just to play around with it. I’ve found the best way to learn things is usually just to jump in with both feet.

As to the biggest question you asked, how do you verify a source, this is actually an issue that has existed for thousands of years. Myself, Joel, and Olivia have all encountered the same problem that different sources will often give different dates or names for the same event.

Usually, the difference is only a few years apart, say 1842 or 1844. Rather than spending hours trying to pin down the correct date, the simpler solution for the purpose of script writing is usually to just say “early 1840s.”

There are many historical sources, often primary sources, that differ in their accounts of basic facts. Basically, you just try to look for consensus. It is an issue that is actually further up the food chain from AI and existed well before it.

Oleg Ulogov asks Why doesn’t the USA have a standard national ID? Is the fact that your identity is not documented consistently anywhere a source of all kinds of problems? If two people with the same name are born on the same day or die on the same day, how do you know who is who?

This is an easy one to answer. The first is that the United States is a union of states. Each state has its own sovereignty to handle its own affairs, such as driver’s licenses.

Second, everyone in the US has a unique identifier in the form of a Social Security number. Also, passports are federal documents that are universally accepted as identification.

Shana Hallam asks Gary… My husband and I have enjoyed your podcast since the beginning. Thanks so much for enlightening us to the world around us. As many have asked you about the possibility of writing a book about your podcast, I wanted to know what it takes to write a book, get it published, and be on the New York Times bestseller list.

Book publishing has sort of become a ridiculous industry. More and more people are bypassing publishers. Publishers are incredibly slow, do a horrible job of picking what books will be popular, and don’t even do much in terms of promotion. The author has to do most of the work.

The number of sales to make it on the NYT bestseller list is shockingly low. As few as 5,000 sales can be enough for a non-fiction book to make the list. As such, many authors have cooked up all sorts of schemes to get on the list, including buying their own book or using a book as a way to launder bribes.

I really don’t want to shop my book around and go through the process. Throughout my life, I have consistently struggled with systems that rely on gatekeepers, so my inclination is to just publish it independently.

MrBillMcBill on Discord asks As an American who is going to start traveling abroad soon, what can I do to avoid the negative stereotypes of American tourists? I’m afraid of being seen as just another annoying American to be dealt with, and if I’m perceived that way, I think it will prevent me from fully experiencing the culture of the place and people. Any tips?

I’ve never had a problem. Almost everyone understands the distinction between people and governments. The further you get away from the US, the less of a problem the negative stereotype becomes. Australians have a negative stereotype in Bali, and the English do in parts of Spain. Whenever a place gets a lot of tourists from one particular place, that place that sends the tourists will get a bad reputation.

Erick Flores on Facebook asks, Hi from Mexico! Now, with the help of ‘The’ Olivia Ashe and Joel Hermanson, what are the odds of getting a double or even a triple episode every now and then?

Erick, that is never going to happen. I do appreciate you wanting more content, but if I had that much bandwidth, I’d just work ahead so I could actually take a proper vacation, or I’d produce special content for Patreon.

Joshua Felty on Facebook, who asks, What do you think of the upcoming Artemis missions? And how do you think they’ll compare to SpaceX and other private space companies?

I did a full episode on the Artemis program back in August of 2022.

If/when Artemis missions actually launch, it will get a lot of attention on the news, and it will be pretty cool if they can make it back to the moon, or even orbit it like Apollo 8.

However, the entire program is a one-off. Like the Apollo Program, it is using incredibly expensive disposable rockets, and it isn’t creating anything that can be built upon in the long term.

The Artemis Program is the last disposable rocket program in history. It makes no financial sense and isn’t sustainable for long-term programs.

The problem is, Starship isn’t ready for prime time quite yet, so we might be a few years away before we can really make long-term progress on establishing a presence on the moon.

The final question comes from Bananaman on Discord, who asks, I heard you say you really love the Dune series in a previous episode. Do you have a favorite movie, game, or book? Personally i really like Dune: Awakening. Also, I love the podcast, keep it up.

That is correct. I’ve read all the books, including all the prequels and sequels, and I’ve read the core books multiple times. I own all the movies and both Sci-Fi channel miniseries on disc. I even recently got the collector’s edition of the David Lynch version from the 1980s.

I have never played any Dune video games, so I can’t really speak to them.

I might do an episode someday about Dune, and maybe one on the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the book and the movie.

That concludes this month’s Q&A episode. If you want to leave a question for next month’s show, you have to join the Facebook group or Discord, or support the show on Patreon, because that’s where I will be soliciting questions.