14 Facts I Learned From Podcasts in 2020
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I listen to podcasts for many different reasons, but a sizable piece of my queue is geared towards learning about the world. Thanks to podcasts from this year, an unknown quantity of tidbits of knowledge are forever lodged into my brain.
Below are just a few of these that I plan to unleash onto a unsuspecting person once social gatherings are a thing again.
1) The supplement industry is largely unregulated.
“The average consumer is assuming that because it’s in a bottle and that it’s sold in a store, somebody is a watchdog. And in the case of dietary supplement products, there are not many watchdogs.”
From The Dream: Take With Caution
2) Science will never be able to predict what you are thinking.
Facebook, Google, and the internet ad complex are pretty good at knowing general behaviors of people, but you don’t need to worry about any company or scientist being able to predict what you will literally be thinking any time soon (or ever). This is because, just like the weather, our brains are chaotic. They follow deterministic laws of physics, but the butterfly effect — where even tiny deviations in the prediction vs reality will cause dramatically different outcomes — will ensure predictions will always be short term in nature. There is no way to get enough data for accurate initial conditions. The effects of random quantum fluctuations in the brain and how much they bubble up to the macro world of brain functioning is also another unknown, one that makes true prediction even more unlikely.
From Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe: Can science predict what you will do?
