Science Fictions

Open up some scientific papers, and you’ll hear electroconvulsive therapy described as the most effective treatment for depression (especially very severe depression). But open up others, and you’ll see it described as completely useless—and a sad indictment on a medical establishment who’ve completely failed to provide proper evidence on it. Not only that, but they’ve exposed patients to serious side effects, like memory loss, for no good reason.
Who’s right? In this episode, we look into the most controversial psychiatric treatment since lobotomy.
NEXT WEEK: we’ll follow this with an episode on another controversial psychiatric treament: antidepressants.
On this week’s episode we discussed the article “The Perks of Being a Mole Rat”, from our sponsor, Works in Progress magazine. As ever, we’re very grateful for their support. You can find many more excellent articles at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* 1937 article by Egas Moniz, lobotomy Nobel Prize-winner
* Weird 1998 article defending him on the Nobel Prize website
* Megan McArdle on Walter Freeman
* The ECT scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
* 2024 article discussing the possible mechanisms of ECT’s effect
* 2010 review about sham ECT studies
* 2019 review of each individual sham ECT study and the meta-analyses that include them
* 2022 response to the review
* Response to the response
* Contemporary news article about the controversy
* 2021 article in defense of ECT
* The parachute RCT
* 2010 meta-analysis on cognitive effects
* 2025 meta-analysis on autobiographical memory loss
Credits
The Science Fictions podcast is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is dedicated to Justin Eldridge.
We like to think that, in often hamfisted ways, we’re applying critical thinking on this show. But what even is “critical thinking”? Can you measure it? Can you teach it to kids—or for that matter, to anyone? Can teaching critical thinking help people defend themselves against misinformation and disinformation? It would be very ironic if “critical thinking” had become a buzzword in the world of education—a buzzword that people used, er, uncritically…
The Science Fictions podcast is brought to you by the marvellous Works in Progress magazine. The article on Swiss vs. Japanese watches that we mention in the episode can be found at this link, and all the other Works in Progress articles can be found at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* NY Times article on schools teaching critical thinking
* UK Government Curriculum Review from 2025
* Daisy Christodoulou on teaching students to spot misinformation
* Daniel Willingham’s 2007 article on critical thinking
* His book Why Don’t Students Like School?
* The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus study
* The tree octopus website
* 2017 Dutch replication study
* Two bigger studies in 2016 and 2019
* 2015 meta-analysis in Review of Educational Research
* Woodworth and Thorndike (1901) - a psychological classic
* Herbert Simon on “problem isomorphs”
* The Stanford Civic Online Reasoning programme
Credits
We’re very grateful to Daisy Christodoulou for talking to us for this episode. Any mistakes are, of course, our own. The Science Fictions podcast is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com/subscribe

Here’s another episode that revists a topic we’ve covered before. A while back, we did an episode on the downsides of cannabis (for example, the risk of psychosis). But of course, a lot of people claim there are medical benefits, too! Not least among them is Donald Trump, who recently re-scheduled cannabis so that it can be studied more for medical purposes.
That research is sorely needed. In this episode, we discuss the very uncertain state of our knowledge on medical marijuana.
The Science Fictions podcast is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine, where you can find Samuel Hughes’s excellent new article on “Urban expansion in the age of liberalism”, as discussed in today’s episode. That’s at worksinprogress.co—which is packed full of other great articles on science, tech, and human progress.
Show notes
* “Trump expands access to cannabis” (December 2025)
* Info from the DEA on drug schedules
* The new JAMA review on medical marijuana
* Reason article on the 2011 RAND study; Retraction Watch article on the same
* Studies on the crime impacts of medical marijuana (increase; neutral; decrease)
* Useful 2021 review of the wider societal effects of medical marijuana legalisation
* 2020 Arizona “natural experiment” study
* Washington Post article on the poor resemblance of “real” marijuana compared to what’s allowed for research studies
* Survey on the use of cannabis for medical purposes
Credits
The Science Fictions podcast is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com/subscribe

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It’s rare that we return to a topic, but it’s also nice to have been right. In 2024 we did an episode on microplastics, and cast a lot of doubt on some of the more outrageous claims about them filling up your brain, your arteries, and (for the fellas) your testicles. Since then a lot more flaws in the science have been found—and at least one of them is utterly devastaing.
Become a paid subscriber to listen to the full episode and read the show notes.

Here’s a cheery one for our first episode of the year. Guess what happens when you give several sets of scientists the same dataset and ask them to answer the same question? Well, they all find the same results, right? Right!?
Sadly not. This “Many Analysts” problem has been analysed and debated in multiple different scientific fields and across several papers. We cover them in this episode. What does it tell us about the objectivity of science if different teams draw different conclusions from the exact same data?
The Science Fictions podcast is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. Their excellent new article on how we’re living in “the golden age of vaccine development”, as discussed on the show, can be found (along with the rest of their articles on science, history, and technology), at worksinprogress.co. We’re very grateful that they support the podcast.
Show notes
* 2015 Nature commentary article on “crowdsourced research” (on racism in football)
* And the full 2018 writeup titled “Many Analysts, One Data Set”
* Gelman and Loken on the “Garden of Forking Paths”
* 2020 many-analysts neuroscience (fMRI) paper
* And the plan for the similar study on EEG
* 2022 PNAS many-analysts paper on the “hidden universe of uncertainty”
* 2026 critique on ideological bias from George Borjas
* 2023 critique on effect sizes vs. statistical significance
* 2025 ecology & evolution many-analysts paper on blue tits and eucalyptus
* 2025 economics many-analysts paper with results on data cleaning
* 2024 PNAS critique of many-analysts research
* Julia Rohrer’s critique of multiverse analysis
Credits
The Science Fictions podcast is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com/subscribe