This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com

It’s been five years since the start of the COVID pandemic (yes, you read that correctly—five years). And the debate still rages online—did the virus come from a wet market, maybe via a pangolin, or from a gain-of-function experiment in a biolab?

In this paid-only episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart cover the lab leak hypothesis, and talk about what it means for how people should make their minds up about scientific controversies.

To hear the full episode, read the show notes, and leave a comment, you’ll need to be a paid subscriber on Substack. You can become one at www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe.

Every so often there’s a controversy related to IQ. The latest was caused by [checks notes] the new Vice President of the US attacking the IQ of a political podcaster on Twitter.

You could argue that the VP should have better things to be doing. But Tom and Stuart certainly don’t, because they’ve recorded a whole episode of The Studies Show on the science of IQ. Hasn’t IQ been debunked as a measure? Does anyone take it seriously in 2025? Doesn’t an IQ test only tell you how good you are at doing IQ tests? In this episode, find out the answers to all these questions and more.

The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine. It’s an online magazine associated with the broad “progress studies” movement, where you can find excellent, data-driven essays on what works to drive scientific and technological advances. You can find every issue of the magazine, for free, at worksinprogress.co.

Show notes

* JD Vance’s tweet about Rory Stewart’s IQ; Rory Stewart’s response

* Study on how standardised testing helps get more poor/minority kids into “gifted and talented” programmes

* 2023 meta-analysis on intelligence and lifespan

* 2018 study (n >2m) from the Israeli military on intelligence and early mortality

* Brief Nature article discussing why intelligence might relate to lifespan

* 2018 article on the psychological problems of high-IQ people

* Huge Swedish study on psychiatric hospitalisation and intelligence

* Can you ever be too smart for your own good?

* Meta-analysis on self-knowledge of IQ

* 2020 study showing that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a “statistical artefact”

* 2023 follow-up analysis

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe

It had to happen eventually: this week The Studies Show is all about philosophy. As we look at science in general, how do we decide what those studies are actually showing?

Tom and Stuart take a look at the Big Two of philosophy of science: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, with their respective theories of falsificationism and paradigm shifts. Both are theories that almost everyone interested in science has heard of—but both make far more extreme claims than you might think.

The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine, the best place to go online for fact-rich, data-dense articles on science and technology, and how they’ve made the world a better place—or how they might do so in the future. To find all their essays, all for free, go to worksinprogress.co.

Show notes

* Tom’s new book, Everything is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World

* Wagenmakers’s 2020 study asking scientists how they think about scientific claims

* David Hume’s 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the problem of induction

* Bertrand Russell’s 1946 book History of Western Philosophy

* Popper’s 1959 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery

* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Popper

* Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Kuhn

* 2019 Scott Alexander review of the book

* Michael Strevens’s 2020 book The Knowledge Machine

* Daniel Lakens’s Coursera course on “improving your statistical inferences”

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe

Before the panic over social media—but after the panic over “video nasties”—was the panic over violent videogames. Was Pac-Man causing little Johnny so much frustration that he’d take it out on his siblings with his fists? Was Doom secretly training little Timmy to be a school shooter?

You don’t hear so much about videogames and violence any more, but if you look at the studies (and the critiques of those studies) there’s a lot to learn about where science can go wrong. In this episode of The Studies Show—in addition to, if we’re honest, just spending quite a lot of time talking about videogames—Tom and Stuart ask whether there’s any decent evidence that gaming can make people more aggressive.

The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine—a journal of underrated ideas to make the world a better place. In the episode we discussed a recent essay on cruise ships, and the surprising (and continual) improvements over the years. You can find all their essays, all of which are free to read, at worksinprogress.co.

Show notes

* Horribly violent games of yore: Death Race, Postal, Postal 2, Carmageddon, Doom II, Quake

* Newer games mentioned in the episode: Slay the Spire, Hades, Doom Eternal, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring

* Hilarious attempt by an MP to ban Space Invaders in 1981

* Chris Ferguson’s 2013 review of videogames and violence

* 2003 review of “The Influence of Media Violence on Youth”

* Pete Etchells’s 2019 book Lost in a Good Game

* List of publications based on the Singapore dataset

* Influential 2008 study by Chris Anderson showing a correlation between videogame violence exposure and violence

* Small Ferguson study from 2012 controlling for several variables and finding no correlation

* Study in the ALSPAC/Children of the 90s dataset

* Are modern, more realistic games worse for us than older ones? Study from 2021

* Use the CRTT to get whichever result you want

* Psychological measures aren’t toothbrushes

* Violent crime rates over time in the US, UK, various European countries, Japan

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com

Is recycling worthwhile? Is sending your rubbish to landfill actually so bad? Grab your cotton tote bag and join Tom and Stuart as they look at the evidence—and the intense political debate and even conspiracy theories—over the surprisingly controversial topic of recycling.

This is a paid-only episode, and to hear the whole thing (and read the show notes), you’ll need to become a subscriber to The Studies Show. Find out how at www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe.

We want scientists to be paragons of objectivity. At the very least, we want them to tell us who’s paying their bills. But it turns out that in some fields of research, the norms about reporting financial conflicts of interest are all over the place. Scientists making big money from after-dinner speeches about their research often don’t think it’s at all relevant to disclose.

In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart look at the evidence on how funding affects the outcomes of scientific research—and discuss whether scientists need to be a lot more transparent about where their money comes from.

Show notes

* 2017 meta-analysis of the impact of funding source (for-profit vs. non-profit) on medical randomised trials

* Tom’s Nature article on undisclosed financial conflicts in psychology research

* New Angela Duckworth paper with no COI statement

* Unconvincing ethics article on COI disclosures and public trust

* Scientist declares his membership of the Scottish Socialist Party in an article about Margaret Thatcher

* Ioannidis article on conflicts of interest in nutrition research

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe

This week, as a gift for New Year’s Eve, we’re opening up a previously-paywalled episode so that everyone can listen. It’s our episode from April 2024 on “Youth gender medicine & the Cass Review”. Since the show notes were previously behind the paywall, they’re copied below.

If you’d like to listen to all our paywalled episodes—which are of course ad-free, like this one—you can subscribe by visiting thestudiesshowpod.com.

Normal service will be resumed next week. Happy New Year!

Show notes

* The Cass Review’s final report

* List of systematic reviews from University of York researchers that were commissioned by the Cass Review

* Hannah Barnes on why the Tavistock gender identity clinic was forced to close

* VICE interview with a Tavistock doctor, including information on patient numbers

* Original Dutch single-case study on puberty blockers

* Somewhat larger Dutch study of puberty blockers from 2011

* The “Early Intervention” study from England (not published until 2021)

* Article that’s critical of the “cis-supremacy” in the Cass Review

* BMJ editorial on the Cass Review

* Billy Bragg claims that the Cass Review only included 2 studies out of 102

* Owen Jones’s video where he claims studies were “arbitrarily” excluded from the report

* Fact-checking post from Benjamin Ryan, covering some of the criticisms of the Cass Report

* Hilary Cass interviewed by The Times

* Episode of BBC More or Less that addresses some of the criticisms

* 2020 study on the small proportion of medical treatments where there’s strong evidence

* More recent (2022) study by the same authors finding an even more depressing picture: “More than 9 in 10 healthcare interventions studied within recent Cochrane Reviews are not supported by high-quality evidence, and harms are under-reported”

* The book Medical Nihilism

* The BMJ review of the book, quoted in the episode

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe

In this final episode of 2024, Tom and Stuart talk about the most exciting scientific breakthroughs of the year… but temper it with some of the worst episodes of scientific fraud and misconduct, too. Then, just as a bonus, they address some of the biggest errors made in episodes of The Studies Show in 2024, too.

Thank you so much for listening in 2024. If you aren’t one already, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the podcast and get access to all the episodes. In any case, we’ll see you for more The Studies Show in the New Year!

The Studies Show is sponsored by GiveWell, the non-profit aimed at making charitable donations as effective as possible. If you’re the kind of person who wants solid evidence that the money you donate is having an important effect on people’s lives, GiveWell is where you should be looking.

You can get your donation matched up to $100 if you’re a first-time donor on GiveWell. Just go to the website (GiveWell.org), then click “Donate”. When you make your donation, say you heard about GiveWell on a podcast, and enter “The Studies Show” to let them know we sent you. Then you’ll see the donation matched.

Show notes

* Saloni Dattani’s “Five Medical Breakthroughs in 2024” post

* Gavin Leech’s “Breakthroughs of 2024” thread on Twitter

* Stuart’s monthly bad science newsletter

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe

In this “fun”, festive episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart discuss two ways—one man-made, one natural—that our species might be wiped off the planet.

The first is “mirror life”, a science-fiction-sounding threat that hardly anyone had heard of until last week, when a group of concerned scientists wrote an open letter arguing that this is a technology that should never be developed. The second is the eruption of a supervolcano, which has a scarily high likelihood of happening in the next century… and for which scientists say we’re “woefully underprepared”. Have a cheery Christmas!

Here’s your chance to do some clear, measurable good this Christmas. We’re pleased to say that we’re being sponsored by GiveWell, the non-profit organisation who use evidence to work out which charities are the most impactful and effective. The really good news is that they’ll match any donation up to $100 for first-time donors who tell them at the checkout that they heard about GiveWell on a podcast, and then choose THE STUDIES SHOW. Go to GiveWell.org and click “donate” to get started.

Show notes

* Mirror life:

* The 300-page full Stanford report

* Science perspective piece on the risks of mirror life

* Asimov Press explainer article

* Supervolcanoes:

* I HATE ICELAND!

* Nature piece from 2022 about our “woeful” level of preparation for a massive volcanic eruption

* 1816, the “year without a summer”

* Evidence against the idea that Mt. Tambora nearly drove humans to extinction

* 2024 paper that’s sceptical of global cooling beyond 1.5 degrees C

* 2023 paper with a much more pessimistic scenario

* Two useful discussions (first, second) of the effects of supervolcanoes on the Effective Altruism forum

* 2018 article on what interventions might prevent or mitigate supervolcanic eruptions

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com

Rather unexpectedly, the idea of separate sports for males and females has become massively controversial—a major flashpoint in the culture wars, and even in the recent US election.

So what does the evidence say? Is it fair if trans women (who are biologically male) compete with females in sports like swimming, or even boxing? How much sporting performance does a lifetime of testosterone grant you? In this paid-only episode of The Studies Show, Tom and (confirmed sport-hater) Stuart look at the evidence on male vs. female sport performance—and discuss whether the argument is really more about ethics and politics than scientific evidence.