The Studies Show. Live. In London. With Jesse Singal. Talking about controversial science. Friday 9 May 2025. What more need we say? Well actually, we say a bit more in this brief podcast.

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As if the basic “pro-life vs. pro-choice” issue wasn’t controversial enough, there’s been a decades-long scientific debate on the impact of abortion on mental health. Does getting an abortion cause a lifetime of depression? Or do most women think that in retrospect it was the correct choice?

As it happens, this issue opens up some massive questions about meta-analysis, bias, and the impact of legal threats on science. Tom and Stuart discuss them in this paid-only episode of The Studies Show.

To hear the full episode and read the show notes, you’ll need to become a paid subscriber at thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe.

With apologies from Tom for lateness because he forgot to press send.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. thinks that seed oils—like sunflower or soybean oil—are causing terrible damage to people’s health. And now he’s the US Health Secretary (wait, what?!) we should probably take him seriously.

In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart trace the origins of the idea that seed oils are uniquely unhealthy, and look at all the best evidence from randomised trials on whether it’s remotely true.

The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine, where you can find detailed, beautifully-written essays on technology and progress. If you need something to read that’s full of unexpected and inspiring ideas about how science and technology can make the world better, you can be confident that you’ll find it at worksinprogress.co.

Show notes

* Joe Rogan’s interview with the aptly-named dietary influencer Paul Saladino

* A typical anonymous tweet about the supposed effects of seed oils

* Article about Ray Peat’s advice on how often to measure your temperature for optimum health

* Guardian article on RFK Jr. and his views on seed oils

* Dynomight on seed oils

* 2013 systematic review on linoleic acid and inflammation

* 2017 systematic review on randomised trials of linoleic acid

* 2015 meta-analysis of cohort studies looking at linoleic acid and coronary heart disease

* 2020 meta-analysis of saturated fat and health outcomes

* The safflower oil study beloved of seed oil worriers

* And the Minnesota Coronary Survey

Credits

We’re very grateful to Stevie Miller for helping us with the research for this episode. 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

Whether it’s the 1903 New York Times article that claimed a flying machine was ten million years away, or the record executive who (allegedly) told the Beatles in the early 1960s that guitar bands were on the way out, predictions are hard.

In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart discuss the psychologist Philip Tetlock’s research on superforecasters, the people who make the most accurate predictions of all. Even if you can’t become a superforecaster yourself, it turns out there’s a lot we can learn from them about how to form beliefs—and how to be right more often.

The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine, where this week Tom has written a review of the new book, Doctored, about fraud in Alzheimer’s research. Read that and many other short pieces on the Works in Progress Substack at worksinprogress.news.

Show notes

* A book chapter on the “Expert Political Judgement” study from Philip Tetlock

* Research on how people interpret terms like “a serious possibility” and “likely”

* Research that argues against the idea that teaming up makes superforecasters better

* Study on the correlates of being a good superforecaster (i.e. having a low Brier score)

* A paper on “small steps to accuracy”: how people who update their beliefs more often are better forecasters

* Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s book Superforecasting

* Julia Galef’s book The Scout Mindset

* Tom’s book, Everything is Predictable

* Tom’s review of Mervyn King’s book, Radical Uncertainty

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

Beginning in 2016, diplomats at the US Embassy in Havana started reporting strange concussion-like symptoms, even though they hadn’t taken a blow to the head. Some claimed they’d been the victim of a mysterious “sonic weapon”, aimed at them from somewhere outside and accompanied by a loud, high-pitched noise. Several scientific papers followed that appeared to confirm they’d been attacked.

In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart tell the whole story of Havana Syndrome, and dare to touch on the highly controversial theory that the symptoms might’ve been the result of mass hysteria (or as it’s now known, “mass psychogenic illness”).

The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. Their Substack is full of shorter articles that highlight apects of science and technology you might never have considered. This week: the surprising story of “The Prophet of Parking”. You can find that any all of their shorter items at worksinprogress.news.

Show notes

* The most recent (January 2025) development in the story of Havana Syndrome

* Stuart’s New Statesman article on Havana Syndrome from 2021

* Long and detailed ProPublica article from 2018

* Wikipedia articles on the LRAD and the Active Denial System

* NY Times article from around the time, about the Trump administration’s reaction to the “attacks”

* US Senate hearings on the “attacks” led by Marco Rubio

* Initial 2018 JAMA article with cognitive and other tests

* Response letters 1, 2, and 3 (“cognitive impairments everybody has”)

* 2019 JAMA article on brain imaging results

* Stuart’s 2015 study on brain imaging in ageing

* Entomologists report on the similarity of the recorded sound to that of a cricket

* Declassified US report that agrees

* A history of mass psychogenic illness

* BBC article on “The Bristol Hum”

* Guardian article on the bizarre phenomenon of Morgellon’s Syndrome

* Article arguing that critics of the “mass psychogenic illness” theory have misunderstood the condition

* 2020 National Academy of Sciences report

* Putin bragging about high-tech Russian weapons

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

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.