Spencer and Jeff challenge the pyramid metaphor for scientific knowledge, exposing how critics of creationism or flat Earth exploit minor errors (e.g., Darwin’s outdated claims) to undermine entire fields, while ignoring their own lack of evidence. Spencer argues science functions like a spider’s web—interconnected disciplines (math, physics, chemistry) reinforce each other through multiple observations, such as gravity’s consistency across chemistry and engineering. Flat Earth theories collapse on single facts like the North Star’s fixed alignment with Earth’s rotation or the Coriolis effect’s hemispheric differences in hurricane spin, proving their foundations are fragile. The segment urges listeners to prioritize metaphors that logically fit reality over tradition, earning a "Bill Nye Award" for its rigorous approach. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, here today again with Jeff.
How are you doing, Jeff?
Not too bad, buddy.
How about you?
Pretty good.
As always, or actually not always, because sometimes I forget.
But if anyone has any problems with this podcast, if anyone wants to tell me about a thing I didn't think of, want to tell me about how they're much smarter than I am, send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And we're going to get right into it today.
This topic is about metaphors mostly, but not about all metaphors, mostly about two metaphors in particular.
And you ever hear the expression about mixing your metaphors?
Yes, yes.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
So we're not going to mix our metaphors.
We're going to swap our metaphors today.
Okay.
All right.
So metaphors, of course, as a part of speech, are used to help provide an image with our thoughts.
It's a comparison of two things as though one is the other, not just like the other as a simile, but is the other as a real analog.
And we often talk about certain things in this way: that this is that, or that is this, and this is just like that.
And when metaphors become so common in relation to a certain thing, we just sort of accept them all the time.
We don't even hardly consider them to be metaphors anymore.
They're just part of that meaning.
The identity of that thing.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so today I'm going to take two that are more or less like that, that are so ingrained and so wrapped around these concepts that we just sort of don't even think about them anymore.
And I'm going to pull them right apart.
And then I'm going to swap the metaphors between those two things.
It's like a magic trick.
So here we go.
First metaphor.
We think of like scientific knowledge or like areas of knowledge as though it's like a pyramid or like a like a building that builds upward in floors or stories.
And we usually kind of look at it, you know, as we compare this.
We don't ever use the word pyramid, but we use things like it has to have a good foundation.
It has to have a good logical base.
And it has to, before you can go to the next level up, which is then built always upon the level below.
And this is generally how we use this.
We use this in parts like this, like it's a building, like we're building upward and that, you know, the base has to be kind of, you know, it's not ever said that the base has to be larger than the floors above, but it has to be solid enough to be a base upon which the next level of knowledge could be built.
And this is how we look at usually like simpler as well.
Like you need to understand arithmetic before you're going to understand algebra.
Well, yeah, you're using the metaphor now, right?
You have to understand how gravity works before you can start to do mechanical engineering.
You have to understand how Ohm's law works before you can do electrical engineering.
You know, we don't even think of this as a metaphor anymore.
It's just, it's just always there, just in the background of our lives.
So the problem with this metaphor is that it's directly comparable to a house of cards.
And some people even attempt to go so far as to sort of imply or state outright that it's a house of cards.
You see this a lot when you engage in conversation with people who are strongly following a reality-denying ideology.
So very particular, some particular ones that do this are creationism and flat earth do this constantly.
It's like they think that an entire section of our knowledge is just a flimsy construction that if they just pull out the base piece at the bottom, the whole thing will collapse.
So you'll get creationists who try to say that some very small bit of wording in a Charles Darwin book from 200 years ago or 150 years ago or whatever is not quite accurate.
And so therefore, the entire science of biology now has to collapse and restart and realize that this whole thing about evolution and all the knowledge that came from it is just bunk and not useful.
Of course, once it's gone, they have one to put in its place.
They know exactly the way it should be.
All they had to do was pull the card out and remove the rest and then put theirs in place.
So is this what you're talking about with like how sometimes the metaphors can mean the opposite of what they actually mean?
Because like a pyramid itself is like one of the sturdiest and most stable structures there.
That's why it exists everywhere in ancient civilizations because it was the easiest big thing to build that wouldn't fall over.
If you built it merely with stone, yes, but if you built it with cards, no.
Almost all houses of cards are having a pyramid structure just the same.
And most people who attempt to tear down an entire area of science this way know almost nothing about that area of science.
And they don't really usually use the word house of cards.
But if you implied to them that this was a house of cards, they would nod along and they would say, yes, exactly.
That's why we just have to pull this one piece out.
And they love it.
They'd like, oh, of course, we just need to.
Newton, when he did gravity, had this one thing wrong.
And if we just remove that, and of course, all of this stuff is gone.
And of course, then the Earth can be flat.
And of course, this is very bad logic, but it is logic that makes sense to some people in this context.
So, okay, that's the first metaphor is that knowledge is like a house of cards or like a pyramid, how whatever you want to build it with.
So the second metaphor is a metaphor related to a web, a spider's web.
We often use a metaphor involving a spider web when we talk about things involving deception or deceit.
What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive, right?
This is the old adage.
Web of lies or a web of lies, right?
And the reason why we use this metaphor for this specifically is because a web is sort of a trap.
It's sort of an ensnaring thing.
And of course, if anyone's ever seen the video of a spider, you know, rolling up a fly in, you know, a bundle of web to, you know, wrap it up to make sure it never leaves, you know, you understand exactly how a confining thing this must be.
So we often talk about this metaphor in this way that it's an ensnaring thing.
And we often talk about conspiracies as this way as well, this sort of web or like a thing that's ensnaring people or wrapping them up and trapping them, ensnaring them in this thing.
So that's the second metaphor that we're pulling apart and we're separating from this.
And then we're going to swap those two things.
So we're going to say now in this context, in this episode of this podcast, that conspiracy hypotheses, instead of being like a spider's web that's ensnaring people, is instead like a series of knowledges that are just a house of cards.
And they are built in the same way.
They have basic parts on the base and then they build higher from that to get more complicated as they go up.
And if you do pull at the base, you will pull a card out and they will absolutely collapse.
And this is always the problem with these reality hypotheses.
All of the reality denying ideologies have very complex stories of this kind.
And once you look very closely at it.
They're always rooted on very sort of elementary lies.
Bad logic.
Yeah.
Or just complete fabrications.
They're not real.
That's why we look at them in this way.
We, you know, it's so easy to pull them apart.
One might think in the world of psychology that that might be a reason why.
The people who are engaged in that think that the other side is also just as flimsy, because their world is flimsy and the other world must also be flimsy, and all we got to do is rip down their house of cards before ours collapses, and then ours will be the reigning supreme house of cards.
Yeah, but of course, real knowledge is not a house of cards.
So that that's the first metaphor that we've swapped.
We've now pulled conspiracy hypotheses away from the metaphor of spider's web and applied them straight to a house of cards.
So now let's do the other one, in that scientific knowledge is not like a pyramid.
It's not one built on the other in the way that a pyramid is all the way up, in that it could ever topple.
Really, it's actually a lot more like a spider's web.
So this one's a little more complicated, but let's see if I can make this make sense.
It makes sense in my head.
I just need the right words.
We're going to get ensnared in what the truth?
Well, it's not a metaphor because of its ensnaring qualities.
It's just a metaphor in its sort of construction, in that you have uh, sort of like primary uh um, I don't know what the parts of a spider web are called, but i'm going to call them threads, sort of primary threads, that move from one center point outward and they attach to different parts of the room you're in and in between them.
In between each of these primary threads are other threads that are attaching them to each other, and this is how real knowledge works.
You have different base knowledges that are complementing each other and they are discovering things that link to the other branches.
So you have math and physics that are tightly intertwined.
They're right next to each other.
Those two guys got developed right next to each other from about chemistry and biology.
Right, physics and chemistry have a huge number as well.
Biology is linked with all those as well.
I mean you, you can see that the idea that one thing might be false, you know, this is another thing that I hear a lot when I talk to people who are in this conspiracy world is that they seem to think that discovering that one thing was flawed or was wrong in some way implies that the whole thing is going away soon, that it's all falling apart.
And, of course, if your knowledge was a web and you found that one little branch was flawed and it, you know, is a flimsy connection and when you went to use it it broke.
Then you you wouldn't bring the whole web down.
It's still connected to all the things it's connected to And has all the other bracings in between, all the other branches that it still has.
You would have to disconnect individually all the many connections between all of these branches of science in order to take even one of them down.
The amount of work you would have to do in debunking physics alone would be unbelievable because you'd also have to prove that all the work in chemistry that has absolutely, by the way, obviously led to many useful things in our lives is also somehow just fraudulent, just fiction.
And if you think that's fiction, well, I mean, dynamite would have to be fiction, right?
Yeah.
It would have to be that no one ever dynamited everything because you never could have created it in the first place.
And if you don't have dynamite, then they obviously didn't blast holes in those rocks to put the railroads through, right?
At some point, that many, many hundreds of thousands of connections here, even if one of them was found to be wrong, that never bothers science.
It never bothers science at all because science isn't a house of cards.
It's not a...
There's another way around to the same answer.
Like a lot of science's theses and hypotheses are based on observation of known facts and things we already have the answers to and making a sort of leap of logic connection based on that.
And sometimes we land in the right spot, but we got there by the wrong math.
But cutting away that one thread doesn't mean that where we landed isn't still the right spot because there's other threads through the other scientific paths that lead to it and prove the point alternatively, right?
Like you say, there are far too many things that gravity affects for someone to just be able to, you know, toss off some little elementary gotcha moment of disproving some small facet of the physics behind gravity and saying, there, ta-da, none of it's true.
Yeah.
Right.
But that's kind of the language that some people use in this in this world, is this conspiracy world, is that they sort of just kind of declare something isn't true and then they come up with some, it's especially egregious in the flat earth community to come up with some extremely basic experiment that's meant to show something about how the earth isn't curved at all.
It's perfectly flat.
And this isn't how science works because science isn't really like a pyramid even.
It's a lot more like a web in this exact way.
If you were a spider on this web and you found that one branch, one of the threads didn't hold, you went to climb on it and it didn't hold you.
It was a false thread.
It wasn't, you know, that bit of knowledge in this metaphor, that mean that bit of knowledge that you thought was true wasn't really true when you tested it, then that would be fine.
The rest of the web still holds.
And then it's also a new opportunity to learn a thing because even in proving something wrong, what you've done is you've created a new observation from which you can learn a new thing.
I mean, this is the thing that scientists get the most excited when they prove that something doesn't work in the way that they thought.
This is the thing.
I mean, some concepts like ESP, extrasensory perception, or telekinesis or all the paranormal stuff, this has been studied immensely by scientists because finding out anything from that space would be phenomenal.
It would be incredible.
It would be a brand new frontier of knowledge that you could discover.
It just so happens that every time they look into it, they can't show or repeat any of the observations that are supposedly made.
They haven't ever said that it doesn't happen.
They just say it doesn't happen in these experiments where we looked, which is pretty much the only thing you could say about God, too.
You know, you can't say God doesn't exist.
They just can't show proof that God does exist.
Take that as you will.
But yeah, what do you think of this idea that we have two metaphors and we've now swapped them?
I understand where you're going with it.
I will play Grammar Nazi and say that I'm not a fan of working with the pyramid metaphor and immediately running it through the sieve into a house of cards instead, because I believe philosophically a pyramid does sort of infer or imply a tremendous amount of stability.
And I prefer to look at the sciences as a pyramid.
You have a foundation of knowledge that you're built upon, that you step up from and up from and up from.
And it's not that the knowledge gets less.
It's just that it gets more, you know, esoteric and harder to get to because you need an ever larger basis of knowledge to be capable of understanding it.
But like underneath each stone is like nine or 16 other stones.
So yeah, kick one stone out all you want.
There's lots there left to provide lots of extra stability to that one fact, that one known point in science, because we got there nine or 16 or whatever different ways.
But I don't want to be too picky because I understand what you're going for with the metaphor thing.
I think also like a lot of the charlatans of promoting the conspiracy theories, like because what they claim to be their truth is based upon such a shaky house of cards, they make that leap right away, the house of cards mentality.
Well, all I should have to do to disprove this thing I'm arguing against is pull out one small cherry-picked fact.
That's at the bottom, at the base, preferably.
That's at the bottom at the base, and the whole thing will come down.
But like hard science, proven science doesn't work that way.
But, you know, bunko conspiracy theories absolutely do.
You have to swallow a great big lie in the beginning.
And then once you've digested that and accepted it in its truth, they can sell anything they want.
Yeah.
But most people who get clear of these sort of out there, what did you call them?
Not anti-reality ideologies.
People who get clear of reality denying ideologies, many of them invariably refer to their aha moment, which is exactly what you're talking about, where, you know, one simple elementary observable fact tears the whole thing down.
Yeah.
I've been working on a way to show that fact, that one observable fact for the flat earth community.
I haven't had any run-ins with any flat earthers on Twitter lately, but it's been a challenge to get that argument to however much it is, 280 characters or whatever.
But it's essentially just that in the northern hemisphere, there is one point in the sky that never moves.
That's the North Star.
It's exactly at the axis upon which our planet spins, the North Pole.
The North Pole points directly at the North Star.
And so if you have a camera that's an old analog camera and you overexpose the film for two or three hours on a clear night, you will see the stars overexpose the film and all the other stars will move in an arc around it.
And you'll see the one star at the middle of those arcs that isn't moving.
And this is, and of course, you don't need a camera to see this effect.
You can go out on any clear night, as long as you don't live in a place where the light pollution gets rid of all the stars.
But you can watch the Big Dipper and the Big Dipper, the one point ends on the North Star and you can watch the Big Dipper turn around the North Star.
You can go out at 9 o'clock and you can see which way it points.
And then you can go out at 2 o'clock in the morning, you see which way it points.
You know, if you go out at 9 o'clock in June and you go out at 9 o'clock in December, it'll be pointing in the opposite direction.
And this is perfectly explained by a round Earth model and not in any way explained by a flat Earth model.
And this is mostly how the people in the ancient world first got the clues that the thing they were on was turning and not that it was flat and everything was moving around it.
Yeah.
Because this one thing didn't move.
Editing Spencer here to let you know that I messed that up.
It's the little dipper that's endpoint is at the north star and turns around in that fashion, just the way I just described, not the big dipper.
So that's on me.
Slap my wrist.
And we're back to the show.
There isn't a star in the southern hemisphere that's intersecting with the south pole.
It's just an empty spot in the sky.
But all the stars do turn around that empty spot all the same, of course.
And they turn in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere as they would in the northern hemisphere because it's a sphere.
So anyway.
Another fun one would be asking a flat earther to disprove or prove why north of the equator toilet rolls and sinks and any draining body of water circles clockwise and south of the border, south of the equator, it's counterclockwise.
How do you describe those physics on a flat plane?
Actually, that's not really true.
No.
After much research, yeah, there are some effects that will cause a thing to rotate in a different direction, like hurricanes start at the equator and work their way towards the poles, and they will turn in one direction in the northern hemisphere and they'll turn the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere because of the Coriolis effect.
And this is why they gain strength as they move up.
Because if you are, you remember that old device that used to be on playgrounds that was kind of a murder machine that you could spin it around and kids would go on there and then they get it spinning around a circle.
The merry-go-round.
You're describing a merry-go-round.
Like it's just like handles and like slickly oiled bearings.
And like if you can get the right amount of inertia going, you can break bones.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was just, I don't understand why anyone wanted that in a playground.
What do you mean?
It was awesome.
That was literally the first, that was literally the first piece of playground equipment I ran to every time when I was a kid.
Yeah.
But if you were on it, if you were on the thing and you were on the edge and then you got spinning at some speed and then used you moved from the edge toward the inside, your body would experience a rotational force around because you're moving inward.
And this is the Coriolis effect.
Hurricanes are starting near the equator and they're moving.
They have some rotational momentum at the equator.
They're 14,000 kilometers or something from the center point of the rotation.
And then they're moving closer to that center point in rotation as they move upward along the parallels.
And this gives them additional rotational momentum.
And this is their gain in force.
And it's a different, you know, they'll spin one direction as they come from the equator heading north.
And they'll spin the opposite direction as they come from the equator and head south.
But when you have like water in a toilet bowl, generally if the water has any movement in one direction, it'll go in that direction.
It takes so little momentum to get it to go that way.
And as soon as you pop the cork in a sink or something, if it has any rotational momentum in that direction, it will get faster in that direction because it's gaining kinetic energy as it drops, right?
So this is why it looks this way.
But if your tap is even a little bit off center, that can give it that little bit of momentum as it goes into the sink, right?
But it's not really true that it moves all on its own, always in one direction on one side of the equator.
Fun fact for science class.
What do you know, kids?
We learned something today.
Yeah.
anything else uh no i think uh uh you you did your uh i got my bill nye award for the day Yeah.
Your Bill Nye Award.
I like that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, in that case, remember that the metaphors you have aren't the only ones you should use for any particular thing.
You're free to use any metaphors you like as long as they make sense.
And I think these metaphors make sense the opposite way.