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When the numbers don’t look right, check them! (Mississippi education update)
Someone who would like to remain anonymous points to this hilariously entertaining video entitled, “1. I watched 40+ hours of Sapolsky neuroscience videos. Madness.”
The scariest parts are the clips from the class, I assume at Stanford, where Sapolsky gives compelling, fast-paced lectures. The students laugh along with him–they absolutely love it! If I were a young student taking that class, I too would believe everything he was saying: he’s so confident, it all makes complete sense, and I’d never even i…
Post navigation
When the numbers don’t look right, check them! (Mississippi education update)
Someone who would like to remain anonymous points to this hilariously entertaining video entitled, “1. I watched 40+ hours of Sapolsky neuroscience videos. Madness.”
The scariest parts are the clips from the class, I assume at Stanford, where Sapolsky gives compelling, fast-paced lectures. The students laugh along with him–they absolutely love it! If I were a young student taking that class, I too would believe everything he was saying: he’s so confident, it all makes complete sense, and I’d never even imagine that he was just making up or misrepresenting his purported evidence. It all just goes by so impressively. It looks like scientific truth! But it’s not!
My favorite line in “1. I watched 40+ hours of Sapolsky neuroscience videos. Madness” was this, at 21:09, responding to the ridiculous claim that chess players are “going through thousands of calories a day doing nothing more than thinking”:
I don’t even know what to do with this one because it is so bananas I had to fact check myself that I actually heard it correctly. So I looked it up and I found him quoted on the Spanish Disney channel.
The video then goes into excruciating detail trying to track this down. We discussed that bizarre claim last year on the blog, which I guess is why the video guy sent this to me.
But . . . hey! Our society’s arbiters of truth–Freakonomics, Sean Carroll, Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, Steven Pinker, NPR, and the Ted organization–all declare that Sapolsky is the Man. Who are we to disagree?
It’s a crime that Stanford students are paying $60,000 a year for this crap. At some level, I get it: Sapolsky’s a star, of course Stanford’s not gonna tell him what to teach. But still. It makes me sad.