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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

So I'm a fan of a natural experiment.

They're very hard to pull off.

But this is a very cool one where they took advantage of this fact that, hey.

We interpret total solar eclipses to mean something.

Therefore, we're going to behave in a certain way.

And now, hundreds of years later, we're seeing that there are actually slightly more protests in these areas.

The last piece I'll say on this, and it's a fascinating paper.

It's free online.

Again, not perfect.

The weakest argument, but one that I do want to mention because I'm curious what you guys think, is their third one, which is,

What is it?

What's the mechanism by which this memory, this shared history of protest is passed on from a place hundreds of years ago to now?

And it could be storytelling, it could be the people who were involved, it could be the families.

They zoom in on whether or not after these protests took place, this peasant uprising took place,

whether or not there were statues or other public monuments put up to commemorate that uprising.

So a lot of revolutions in China have been the result of uprisings, and so they play a very, very big role, kind of like how we put civil war leaders in statues and other things, which obviously is controversial.

They argue that the places that have these monuments to that social unrest are the ones where you're even more likely to see social unrest today.

I find that to be kind of...

Less compelling a is that really the the mechanism and be it also kind of muddies the the causal story that they're telling about a about a culture of it like maybe it was it was just something that was so significant therefore I put up a monument therefore I'm going to continue to protest and so I actually think it kind of weakens their argument.

But overall, I think the stark difference of, you know, if you experience the total solar eclipse when Confucianism was the rule of the day, you're more likely to see protests now, I find to be very exciting.

Showing 441–460 of 1,079 · page 23 of 54