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April 9, 2024 - Skeptoid
18:12
Skeptoid #931: Error Erasure Extravaganza

It's time once again for Skeptoid to correct another round of errors in previous shows. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Correcting Past Skeptoid Errors 00:02:44
Once again, we're going to take our thick red marker and call out all the errors in previous Skeptoid episodes.
We try to keep the resource as valuable as possible, so when an error is found, we correct it.
And that's exactly what we're going to do today, with significant errors found in six different episodes.
And a big thanks to everyone who sends in the corrections.
That's coming up right now on Skeptoid.
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You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Error Erasure Extravaganza.
Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.
Today we have a special treat.
Another in our series of episodes where all I do is correct errors in previous shows.
As Thomas Jefferson said, ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.
In other words, if I'm going to say something wrong in a show, it would have been better if I hadn't done the show at all.
And nobody wants that.
So let us dive right in and correct some recent errors.
In our recent episode number 928 on EMDR, the controversial psychotherapy to treat PTSD using bilateral stimulation, I mentioned the American Psychological Association, the APA, which is the authority for standards of care and psychology in the United States.
Debunking Martin Luther King Myth 00:04:58
By way of a flourish of additional detail, I mentioned that they also publish the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the principal guide for the practice in the United States, and also used in much of the rest of the world.
Listener Dan wrote in and said, I think the current episode of Skeptoid says that the American Psychological Association publishes the DSM.
That's not right.
It's the other APA.
It's published by psychiatrists, not psychologists.
MDs versus PhDs.
I make this mistake all the time, too.
Correct, he is.
This was an erroneous attribution.
The DSM is published not by the APA, but rather by the APA.
Confused?
It's the American Psychiatric Association who publishes it, not the American Psychological Association.
Both exist, both are called the APA, and basically everyone in the profession hates the resulting confusion.
Anyway, I struck the line from the transcript as it was superfluous in addition to being wrong.
So this next one is very, very interesting.
In episode number 918 on myths about Martin Luther King Jr., I included the story about his name change.
His father, known as Daddy King, changed both his own and his son's names from Michael King to Martin Luther King.
The story I gave is that while Daddy King attended the 1934 Baptist World Alliance Congress in Berlin, Germany, he visited some of the Martin Luther sites, including Wittenberg, became inspired, and decided to make the name change.
Well, it appears we still do not have the complete story.
I heard from someone who would know his part in the story beyond much reasonable doubt, listener Mirko, who is the director of the Luther houses, Mansfeld and Eiliben in Germany.
He said, In your last episode on MLK, you fell for a myth yourself, a myth which is widely believed, repeated up and down even in the most recent publications on MLK, and which apparently was even believed by himself.
The myth that Martin Luther King Sr. named himself and his son after the German reformer Martin Luther after his visit to Wittenberg in Germany in 1934.
But Daddy King never seemed to have visited Wittenberg at all during his attending the World Baptist Conference in Berlin.
I searched the visitor books of the Luther House in Wittenberg from the year 1934 and found no entry by him.
I know absence of proof is not proof of absence, but there is more.
In his autobiography Daddy King, 1980, he never mentioned Wittenberg or the German reformer at all, even though he recalled his stay in Berlin and hearing Hitler on the radio vividly.
Regarding the new name, he told a very different story.
Mirko then gave the exact quote from Daddy King's autobiography, which I verified.
I was still known as Mike King at this time, although my father insisted until the day he died in 1933 that he had named me the day I was born, and my name was Martin for one of his brothers and Luther for another one.
So according to his own word, his renaming of himself and his son was for two of his father's brothers, Martin and Luther, and not due to any inspiration from Martin Luther in Germany.
But this is Skeptoid, and we check.
So I crowdsourced this out to see if anyone could verify the existence of the brothers Martin and Luther.
Records are scarce and incomplete, including on most of the online ancestry websites.
At last, listener Sean found a Luther.
I checked out familysearch.org.
FamilySearch does show a sibling by the name of J. Luther King, but no Martin.
Looking on the mother's side, Delia Lindsay King, I see no Luther or Martin.
Poking around some of the more extended family on both sides didn't yield any Martin prior to Martin Luther King Jr. that I could find.
And this was the experience of everyone else too.
No Martin.
And so we still have a bit of an unresolved mystery.
If anyone listening now has access to any more comprehensive King family records going that far back, please check it out and let me know at brian at skeptoid.com.
But as for the inspired by the trip to Germany story goes, it's probably debunked.
Listener Feedback and Corrections 00:10:25
Episode number 911 was about the mythological planet Nibiru, believed by some to be a rogue planet that will crash into the Earth and destroy us all.
In that episode's extended content for premium members, I talked about a related story, a hypothetical companion star to the Sun called Nemesis.
The idea is that when the long elliptical orbit of Nemesis passes through the Oort cloud, a belt of icy comets out beyond the outer planets, it would disrupt them and cause a comet bombardment of the Earth, causing mass extinction events.
I immediately heard from my daughter Erica, currently a grad student in astrophysics, that the Oort cloud is itself only theoretical and has never yet been observed.
It is the most widely accepted explanation for the origin of long-period comets, but I was in error to take its existence as a given.
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In episode number 862 on human mosquito magnets, I gave a bit of background on how malaria is carried by mosquitoes and transmitted to humans.
Listener AJ, who studies this exact thing, wrote in with an improvement.
By all accounts, mosquitoes do not suffer any ill effects from harboring plasmodium species, so they cannot carry malaria.
And while I'm at it, I'd recommend switching from referencing Plasmodium malariae to Plasmodium falciperum.
Pardon my lack of Latin skills.
Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for the most infections and deaths.
Sure enough, the references he provided proved I put the blame on the wrong species.
So the episode transcript has been updated.
As far as the rest of it goes, at first I couldn't figure out what he meant because we were saying the same thing.
But then a more careful review of the wording I used revealed that it was easy to get the impression I meant that the mosquitoes themselves got infected with malaria and passed it to humans.
So I fixed that language as well to be more clear that the mosquitoes are happy all day long, giving the plasmodia a free ride and cheerfully injecting them into us without any problem for themselves.
Little bastards.
Now we're going to go all the way back to episode number 138, a pop quiz on whether the famous people mentioned were real or fictional.
One of these was Johnny Appleseed.
He was real, actually a guy named John Chapman, and I said that he earned his nickname, quote, by planting nurseries to grow apple trees beginning on his own land grant that he received as a Revolutionary War soldier fighting under George Washington, end quote.
Listener Freeman wrote, In fact, it was his father, Nathaniel, who had been the soldier.
John was born in September 1774, and thus would have been nine in 1783 at the end of the Revolution.
While there were some young musicians in the Continental Forces, I have found no record of young John serving.
And Freeman provided a number of references to support this, as I always ask.
So consider the error fixed, and I've updated the transcript accordingly.
And finally, I'd like to take you back even further back to the very first year of Skeptoid.
In those days, I still wasn't sure what kind of a podcast it was going to be.
I didn't know if it should be a debunking show, or if it should just be a show telling amazing stories.
And I still didn't know that it was eventually going to end up being a good science show that actually adheres to standards.
So some of the early shows were a little bit loose.
One of those was episode number 56, On Bizarre Places I'd Like to Go.
And yes, that was still the first year because in those days I did an episode every four days instead of weekly for some reason.
And now I can look back at that episode and sure enough, some of those bizarre places might be neat for real, but some of the things I said about them were untrue.
I thought they were true at the time, but in those days I didn't do any fact-checking.
I just parroted whatever it was I'd heard from friends or read on the internet.
One of the things I mentioned was the Devil's Hole in Death Valley National Park.
I described it as, quote, a small puddle against the side of a rock, apparently.
But that was actually, quote, the tiny opening to a vast underground water system that connects to Montezuma Well, a spring in Arizona that's so far away it's ridiculous.
That's just ridiculously wrong.
Not only the Colorado River, but several mountain ranges separate the two.
The Devil's Hole cave system is indeed extremely deep, and its full extent is unknown.
But it absolutely does not connect with Montezuma Well.
The transcript has been corrected.
There's one other comment I exaggerated in that episode pertaining to the mud caves of Anzabarego State Park.
It's a Badlands area, and when it rains, water flows to the low points, soaks into the ground, and carves underground rivers where the runoff flows out into the washes.
Most of the year, these rivers are bone dry and you can walk through them.
I said in the episode they, quote, twist for miles beneath the dusty Badlands.
That's incorrect.
There are no known mud caves as long as a mile, but some do stretch the better part of a mile before they open up onto the surface.
And thus we conclude another error correction episode.
I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did taking this trip back through Memory Lane and fixing the broken memories.
Until next time, when we have another batch of errors, I will ask you to always be skeptical.
We continue with a correction sent in that I did not choose to include for obvious reasons in the ad-free and extended premium feed.
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