Science or Fiction Ancient Medicine

You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Your esc ape to real ity . Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, May 14th, 202 6, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody. Kara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein. Good afternoon, folks. How's everyone doing today? Alright.y Steve Thursdays, I'm so tired after clinic for three days. How did you do this for how many years? Thirty years. Oh my god It's so exhausting. Gotta have endurance, Cara. Working on it. I'm too old for this. It's starting too late. You have to have patience in see what I did there. So last week, uh I famously went on a rant about user inter face and shittification and we got a lot of feedback about it. Oh yeah. I was gonna give you the gestalt of the feedback and not you know, call it individual people. So a couple of things. A couple of people a lot of experts emailed, which is great. I always love it when people who know more than we do engage with us about these topics. We're right in the sweet spot for a user oh wait, yeah, a user uh experience. Yeah, a lot of these people are programmers, things like that. Yeah, there's a lot of them out there. So um just to clarify a couple of things, a couple of people pointed out that there are experts in the user interface, those that's UI , but there are also now ex experts in the user experience, that's UX. UX. And there are also UX engineers who kind of bridge the gap, but it's it was unclear to me exactly what role they play. So the the difference is like the user experience experts are the entire user experience, not just the software user interface, right? Everything from purchase to to use to fixing, everything. Uh whereas the you know UI is basically the software engineers who are experts in the user interface. And they all pretty much agreed that, yeah, I was right. It it is getting worse and it's pretty bad. They appreciated the call out to their specialists, like, we're really underutilized, and the those that expressed an opinion were pretty aligned in saying that Yep, they just don't want to spend the money. What I don't get is that the really successful companies, you know, and uh I'll name two, Tesla and Apple, right? So these are two of the biggest, most successful tech companies in the world , both famously had awesome user experience, right? And user interface. Yeah. Of course. That's what m put them on the map, I think. Yeah. Right. I mean the Steve Jobs was famous for like perfecting the user experience of using the Apple products, which were cool and even intuitive. Even taking it out of the box was an experience. That box is like the best box I ever saw. And so I said, why don't more companies emulate that? I said, Well, there's it comes down to a couple of things. So one is you some companies do try to do that, but it's hard and they fail. And most of them just rip off Apple. It just looks like an Apple button. Well some people do that. That's the cheap way to do it. I mean we know that from the movies too. It's like this movie was successful. Let's replicate the most superficial aspects of that movie. But th others don't even try to do it. They they say w they're they're like business oriented where they just they basically say what's the least amount of money we could spend to get a product to to market fast? And they that's a just a completely different approach. They're not trying to make the best project product or the best user interface. They're trying to get quick ROI, get to market quickly, and it's just a completely different approach as opposed to the sort of the engineering oriented, which is trying to make the best product. And it's like, okay, I get that, but um I guess most companies are just and again, I think this is I think a problem with our world in that it's there's a lot of rushing for barely adequate mediocrity, right? And I think AI is gonna make that so much easier and so much more tempting. This is the AI slot problem where it's just really easy to be barely adequate. And so that's mostly what we get, rather than striving for excellence, which is hard and is more risky and takes a lot of expertise. And I think people need to rec alibrate their like old assumptions about laissez-faire capitalism that somehow, you know, just having a free market of ideas means that the cream is always going to rise to the top. No, the fastest , most profitable thing is going to happen until it burns itself out and then a new one is going to fill that niche or niche stuff. I agree. I've spoken to a lot of people who are sort of stuck in a very simplistic algorithm of what they think capitalism is that it favors only the most successful best product and m best quality. Have you seen Amazon? Have you seen Alibaba? Like come on, people. Well, no, it's like when there's a market, when there's an unfettered free access market, you're just going to get flooded with garbage. And it's going to be hard to find the good stuff . And also we're living in a culture where cheaper, faster, better, and disposable has become the norm. I think also part of what they miss is that free market uh forces sometimes only favor the appearance of quality and utility, not its reality. And you have to understand in each individual, you know, industry, sphere, product, how much does the end user really perceive about the actual quality? How easy are they to fool? Do they have all the information they need? I mean if I I've had people make this argument to me about drugs, like we don't need an FDA. The free market could sort out which drugs work and which don't work. No, they absolutely cannot. We have a free market drug industry. It's called the supplement industry, and it's ninety-nine percent crap. So we don't have to imagine what that would be like. We know what it's like. We knew what the world was like before the FDA with patent medicine and snake oil. We know what it's like in the post sort of regul ation uh supplement market, and it's mostly useless products with all hype and deception. And so no, that's what the free market does also. And so what you're saying, Steve, is that we need to be reading more Upton Sinclair. Is that what the jungle people. Like, come on, go back to school. You gotta you gotta ba balance I and Rand with Upton Sinclair. You can't just have read Rand and think that you understand everything about free marketing. And to be clear you,'re not saying those are equal and opposites. You're saying those of you who only read Ayn Rand need to go out and read Hubdinson. Well just you need to have a more nuanced view. Nothing is simple, right? The world is complicated. People are complicated. There's always nuance. And yeah, the the markets like just say again it's like I I do again, I've had many conversations with people who just treat free markets like a magic wand. Just wave the magic wand at the free market and everything will work out. It's like, no, that's not that's not histor that's not history. We have we ha we have so much knowledge about how that is not true. You you know, markets themselves need rules and they need again there needs to be selective pressures and we have to to some extent engineer those so that you do favor transparency and quality and all whatever user experience, all those things. If it's just about profit, it's if just about profit, then there are many other ways that the market forces can sort themselves out. And it is like evolution. You can make a very good analogy to evolution. Evolution doesn't want you to be happy and have a live a life But it doesn't matter. It only matters that you're passing those genes on to the next generation. Um, or you make other people's lives brutal and misery, you know? Mm-hmm and miserable. So yeah, evolution creates p like horrible parasites like, like things why would nature ever do something like that? 'Cause that's how narrowly defined selective pressures work. So Steve, is your printer working? What's up? It's yeah, it is working. Actually had to use it and it worked.. Finally Also someone said, hey, you could always just plug it in, which is what I do with my printers, frankly. A lot of the problems do go away. Yes, but a lot of them were again, this is again, I think another layer here where you have sort of engineers who are like, Oh, I just plug it in and if this happens I do this troubleshooting thing or if that happens, it's like okay. Yeah, basically it's like okay. But that is again, as an end user, I don't wanna have to spend any of my mental energy getting my freaking printer to work. You know what I mean? It's a j I just want it to be plug and play and I don't wanna have to think about it. And so you're just replacing one elaborate, you know, method for another one. And that may be something you're comfortable with if that's what you do for a living or whatever, if that's you have that expertise. And again, I'm not saying that I'm not computer literate. It's just that saying you could substitute this alternative elaborate procedure doesn't really address my concern. Aaron Ross Pow Didn't a lot of people say that most of these companies are trying to get you to download