Andrea Jones-Rooy

speaker

1,079 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 5 Sep

Andrea Jones-Rooy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe · The Skeptics Guide #978 - Apr 6 2024 podcast

So it's not super, super recent, but recent enough to be interesting.

So they compare protests in China

between 2001 and 2013, against the history of protests in these places.

And they find that places in China that were in the path of the total solar eclipse way back in the Qing Dynasty, this is 1600s, 1700s, and so on, are today more likely to see anti-government protests about wealth inequality than those that were not in the path of totality hundreds of years ago.

And I just found it to be stunning.

Some caveats.

So the magnitude is not massive.

The coefficient here is very, very small.

So one additional rebellion between 1644 and 1912 predicts 0.2 more episodes of social unrest from 2001 to 2013.

But it's, you know, insofar as we care, it's statistically robust, and they do a number of different estimates.

Is it overall protests?

Is it protests per capita?

Is it protest participants?

Is it how serious is the unrest?

So it's robust to all of those things.

And what's so cool about this to me is they've also made sure that these solar eclipses are orthogonal to anything that might be causing social unrest.

So you could be thinking, well, maybe the total solar eclipses in China happened recently,

Along the coast more often or in an area where there were more farmers and so therefore it was agriculture and they were able to hold constant those various things and also show that total solar eclipses, you know, they have some maps of the paths, you know, like the one we're seeing in the US.

It's really stretching across a big stretch of the country and over 300 years there were quite a lot crisscrossing.

And so they, I think, pretty compellingly hold hold constant any other effects of like, yeah, something else could have been going on in that area that made it both more likely to have protests and more likely to have social total solar eclipses.

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