A slightly tipsy investigation into my wife's superpower
And other links and updates for Winter 2024
This is the quarterly Links ‘n’ Updates Post, all the stuff I’ve been doing and reading over the past few months. Starting with—
1. THE EGG EXPERIMENT
My wife Priya can detect the smell of eggs on plates, even after the eggs are gone and the plates have been washed.
This isn’t, like, the main thing about her. She has many other admirable qualities. But when we’re taking plates out of a dishwasher, she’ll be like, “Ugh these still smell like eggs,” and I'll have no idea what she’s talking about. I can’t smell it at all.
It's a trippy experience, being completely oblivious to something your spouse finds obnoxious1. It’s like she’s Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense watching dead people walk around and I’m there with a mouthful of scrambled eggs going, “Whatcha looking at?”
I was hanging out with Slime Mold Time Mold a few weeks ago and, since we were hosting a party, we decided to run a quick study.
MATERIALS
One of the members of the Slime Mold hive mind, who I’ll call Raccoon #42, served as my sous chef, like this:
I scrambled three eggs while Raccoon #4 got three brand-new plates from a kitchen store. I then ate the eggs off two of the plates, making sure to get the plates nice and eggy. I put one plate in the dishwasher and ran it through the one hour “quick wash” setting. I rinsed the second plate and then wiped it clean (no soap).
We kept the third plate eggless as a control, though we rinsed it and dried it too (without letting it touch anything egg-contaminated), just to keep the three plates as similar as possible. I labeled each plate with sharpie on the bottom, but otherwise they looked identical.
PROCEDURE
At the party, I invited each guest one-by-one to a side room, where I had arranged the plates randomly on a desk. (The party had been going for a while, so the participants, as well as the experimenter, may have been slightly tipsy.)
First, I asked them to smell each plate and report any odors they detected.
I then informed each person that between 0 and 3 of the plates may have had eggs on them, and I asked each person to determine which ones had been touched by eggs, if any. (They were allowed to re-sniff the plates, if they wanted to.)
I recorded the odors they described and whether they correctly identified each plate. Then I went and got the next person.
After everyone had a chance to sniff the plates, I interrupted the party again to ask everybody to rate their smelling ability from 1 (worst) to 7 (best).
RESULTS
Here’s what the results looked like. Checkmarks mean they guessed correctly—they said “egg” for an egg plate, and “nothing” for the control plate—and X’s indicate incorrect guesses. I’ve also included the comments each subject made, if any.
Nobody spontaneously detected the smell of eggs on the plates. However, once they were asked to look for eggy plates, everyone correctly identified the rinsed plate, and two people also identified the plate that had been through the dishwasher. Only one person mistakenly thought the control plate had been tainted by eggs.
(Priya couldn’t make it to the party, so she’s not one of the subjects.)
Raccoon #4 and I then repeated the experiment on ourselves. We knew we were looking for egg smell, but we didn't know which plate was which. Our results looked like this:
I was utterly hopeless, a bum with a bum nose. Raccoon #4, on the other hand, could even tell the difference between the hand rinsed plate and the dishwasher’d plate.
Later, I found out this very issue has divided other families as well. In this post on Mumsnet.com, a desperate mom explains how she can smell eggs on plates, but her husband can’t. She asks if she’s being unreasonable.
The internet says yes, she is! Even though I lack a Haley Joel Osment-eque sense of smell, I have to say: no, she’s not.
Other folks on the internet suggest that Westerners are particularly bad at detecting this smell, which is called zankha in Arabic:
a particular unpleasant smell that lingers on cups or plates, produced by certain foods, such as fried eggs. The culture believes after eating fried eggs, immediately rinse plate, fork with cold water, even pouring leftover Turkish coffee over offensive cutlery, china or anything contaminated by the egg. you will often hear a person from Lebanon asking a waiter to replace a glass of water, because it smells like ZANKHA, clearly, accusing manual dishwasher of using the same sponge for washing glasses with an egg contaminated sponge!
My subjects were all white Westerners (as far as I can tell), but some of them were able to confidently detect this smell and knew exactly what I was talking about when I mentioned it to them.
My takeaway from all this: in olfactory capabilities, as in everything else, I have married up.
2. OTHER MISADVENTURES
While I was hanging out with SMTM, they also made me eat some alkali salts.
Later, I sent them a letter about how we know stuff. Here’s an excerpt:
A situation like this is a good test of your epistemic immune system. If you’ve never really thought about the causes of the obesity epidemic and your immediate reaction to a new explanation is “NO WAY, IMPOSSIBLE, REJECT, I ALREADY KNOW THIS ONE,” your mental t-cells are probably too active. That doesn’t mean the new explanation is right, just that it’s a little silly to scrunch up your face at it.
The solution isn’t to be more gullible. The world is full of crazy people saying crazy things; we’re right to be skeptical. In fact, the solution is to be more skeptical, and to direct a healthy dose of that skepticism toward your own thoughts, because that’s the only way to realize when your certainty-to-evidence ratio is out of whack.
Most of my beliefs are unconsidered and unsupported. I’m not ashamed of that––who’s got the time to consider and support every single thing they think? I scrutinize the few things I care about and make my best guess on the rest. Every time I see someone react to a new hypothesis like they’ve just tasted lemon juice, it’s a helpful reminder that I need to file my guesses under “Guesses” and not under “EXTREMELY CERTAIN AND WELL-KNOWN THINGS THAT I KNOW.”
~*~*~*little is known, but much is believed*~*~*~
3. SOME STUFF I READ RECENTLY THAT I LIKED
Nobody thinks the US News college rankings are good for the world (see How to drive a stake through your own good heart). But I only recently learned that colleges have to pay for the privilege of displaying their US News rank. If there’s a Nobel Prize for scams, I’d nominate this one.
The Lifetime Achievement Award for Scams, of course, has to go to academic journals, many of which were started as perpetual moneymaking machines by Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad). From a recent article:
Richard Charkin, the former CEO of the British publisher Macmillan, who was an editor at [Robert Maxwell's publishing company] Pergamon in 1974, recalls Maxwell waving Watson and Crick’s one-page report on the structure of DNA at an editorial meeting and declaring that the future was in life science and its multitude of tiny questions, each of which could have its own publication. “I think we launched a hundred journals that year,” Charkin said. “I mean, Jesus wept.”
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner:
Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women-old and young-detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering?
A classic: Kevin Simler’s Ads Don't Work That Way. Most people think ads work basically by brainwashing—show men a can of Budweiser next to an attractive lady and they’ll go “HUBBA HUBBA GOTTA GET ME A BUD.” Sure, that could be part of what they do, but effects like this are extremely flimsy. Instead, Simler suggests that an under-appreciated way ads work is by “cultural imprinting”:
Cultural imprinting is the mechanism whereby an ad, rather than trying to change our minds individually, instead changes the landscape of cultural meanings — which in turn changes how we are perceived by others when we use a product. Whether you drink Corona or Heineken or Budweiser "says" something about you. But you aren't in control of that message; it just sits there, out in the world, having been imprinted on the broader culture by an ad campaign. It's then up to you to decide whether you want to align yourself with it.
Speaking of the limits of psychology—
Recently, I saw a talk about the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, where anybody in the world could submit interventions aimed at reducing “partisan animosity,” “support for anti-democratic candidates,” and “support for political violence.”
(I’m less concerned about partisan animosity than most people are. But of course it would be great if we could find a way to stop people from saying things like, “I sure would love to hit my political opponents over the head with a frying pan.”)
Anyway, the winner in the “partisan animosity” category was this Heineken commercial from 2017. That is, when it came to making Democrats and Republicans like each other more, ad execs at a beer company beat a bunch of academics without even trying.
To be fair, the video was selected and submitted by psychologists, and other interventions succeeded across all three categories, while this video only succeeded in one. But it should keep us all humble that, when it comes to reducing partisan animosity, our best technology is a beer commercial.
The metascientist and science funder
says:We shouldn’t pay for so many people to try to enter biomedical academia [...] It’s like paying 50 people to spend several years prepping to be a Buc-ee’s assistant manager when there are only 10 positions available.
(Bucc-ee's is a gas station/convenience store chain in the American south, and apparently if you work your way up to the manager level there, you make more than the director of the National Institutes of Health.)
The Woman Who Spent 500 Days in a Cave.
I’ve gotten an odd amount of pleasure reading the blog Bits About Money, like this post about why banks randomly close people’s accounts, this post about how checks work, and this post about payroll processors. If there's a prize for “blog that sounds the least interesting when described compared to how interesting it is when you actually read it,” I'd like to nominate this one.
Courtney Dauwalter, the ultra-marathoner who may be able to run farther than any other human on Earth, is an inspiration:
Dauwalter still approaches her sport with a carefree attitude. She drinks beer and eats pizza, loves sweets and cheese quesadillas. She usually averages around 100 miles per week but doesn’t follow a regimented training routine.
“I’ll just head out in the morning and run however far I feel,” says Dauwalter. In a world of disciplined, straight-faced sports in which athletes ditch the joy in pursuit of marginal gains, Dauwalter often has the air of an adult who never grew out of her skateboarder phase.
“I want to eat and drink what sounds good. I want to hang with family and friends, and I want to sign up for these 100 or 200-mile races and push myself as hard as I can,” she says. [...] “My hope is that I'm collecting all sorts of memories and moments that when I'm old and sitting on my rocking chair with my husband reflecting on life, we are laughing and smiling fondly about.”
4. OPPORTUNITIES FOR LIZARD SCIENTISTS
The Seeds of Science is offering research fellowships, check ‘em out!
The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) in the UK has announced its first round of funding, which is called “Nature Computes Better.” I’ve spoken with a program manager there and they seem very forward-thinking, so I’m excited to see what they do.
5. UPDATES FROM EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY HQ
Just a reminder that you can get voiceovers of Experimental History posts wherever you get your podcasts, like Spotify. I started by re-recording the oldest posts and I’m just about to catch up with myself, so this is a good way to get the back catalog if you missed it the first time around.
Speaking of which, here’s a post from one year ago:
FINALLY, THE BOY OF THE PRESENT HAS A GLIMPSE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY BOY
Some have described this experience as “being a husband”
If you're wondering why they’re pseudonymous, here's their answer.
“When I asked Subject 5 to describe the indescribable smell, they responded, “It’s indescribable.”” This sentence just made my entire day. Thank you!
There is a particular kind of noise called white noise that you are not supposed to hear because your brain filters it out. My bring does not filter it out. My brain finds it, locks onto it, and cannot ignore it. They make sleep machines that generate white noise to mask other sounds. They keep me awake, and quickly drive me to something approaching frenzy. They install white noise generators into the ceilings of open plan offices to reduce the sound of chatter between cubicles. You are not supposed to hear them. I have made techies crawl into the ceiling to disconnect all the ones in my vicinity because they drive me round the bend. I believe that your wife can smell egg on a washed plate.