( caption revisions in progress ) >> Today's episode is brought to you by Squarespace.
>> Head on over to Squarespace.com/rogue,
sign up for a free trial and when you do,
sign up for the service, use promo code rogue at checkout,
get 10% off and be more awesome than you already are!
>> You're pretty awesome though.
>> Well, yeah, okay, technically you can't go past 10
but we'll call it 11.
>> What kind of weird superstitious beliefs did you have?
>> This is the dumbest thing but I got
a turbo graphic 16, I think it was in ninth grade
or something, Keith Courage and Al Fazones,
there would be like I don't know,
some special thing that gave points
and it only came out every so often
but for some reason,
if one of us shouted the word "Chomp,"
then it tended to come out.
[laughs] >> What!?
>> And so we were playing this game, we would go, "Chomp!"
And then it would happen and we'd be like, "See, it works!"
[laughs]
>> All right, we'll break it down,
four weird ways that you can predict the world
using rogue science,
this is an article from Eamon Lahiri
that's on themodernrogue.com,
and I guess we'll rank them according to what?
What's most surprising, or impressive,
or just which one we like the most, right?
>> Yeah, I think so.
Which one we think we would get the most benefit out of.
[keyboard typing] [whooshing]
>> This first one is a study that indicates
that you can legitimately predict
the stock market's performance, in the short term,
to a degree up to 86% accuracy,
based on moods on Twitter.
>> You can also tell when the stock market
is going to be really racist.
>> Yeah, that's right, filled with trolls.
They're all like, "Bye."
And then they're like, "SIKE."
To me, this seems like inherently true,
because, keep in mind, the stock market
is literally just a bunch of humans
making rational decisions based on how they feel.
And yes, there are day-trading robots
that have algorithms and all that stuff,
and occasionally there's runaway spikes and stuff,
but in general, it's humans making decisions
that determine how the market does.
>> And, to borrow a phrase that you often use,
it's essentially a shared hallucination.
>> Yeah, correct.
I mean it only has value because we believe it has value
and if our feelings change then the actual value changes.
So in this case they did a large-scale survey
and they looked for 72 different words
indicating people's feelings, whether they were uncertain,
and then they tested it on stuff that you would expect.
For example, the day before an election,
people in general feeling very uncertain,
the day after the election, they're feeling another way.
They found that periods of calm, and a lot of use of words
that indicate that people are calm,
were reliably correlated
to either stock market going up or going down.
It's great to have the evidence to back it up,
it almost just rings so obviously true,
that to me it makes it less impressive,
but also, we're talking about literally predicting
the stock market based on Twitter, that's amazing.
>> Yeah, they have just mass scale,
10 million tweets over 11 months,
and they analyzed that, and again,
that accuracy level is nothing to sniff at.
That is staggering.
>> It makes me wonder how much of that
is already being used,
'cause, you know, in a world where machine learning
gets better and better,
and that data set just gets larger and larger,
I a hundred percent believe this,
and it's our first one on the leaderboard.
Very impressive. >> Absolutely.
[whooshing] [keyboard typing]
Here's one that's also kind of a no-brainer.
Google Street View being used to tell how much you earn,
just by looking at your house.
>> So machine learning, using an image analysis program,
was able to predict with a higher degree of accuracy
than knowing people's demographics,
their sex, their ethnic background.
>> Their education, all the things that are usually used
to factor into figuring out how much someone makes,
this just analyzed a picture,
which, duh, you can drive by my house
and go, "Yeah, he's poor."
And then just keep going.
But it was very accurate.
>> It is, it is wild to live in a world where
wherever you are, you can just bust open a Zillow app
and know what everyone's house is worth.
>> Yeah. >> Isn't that crazy?
>> Yep, they had also done something like this similarly
using Google Street View and people's cars.
They could get a similar degree of accuracy
just by looking at your car and going,
"Oh, here's how much he makes."
>> Yeah, this one also I think makes sense because
regardless of how much you make,
there's sort of a percentage that we tend
to allocate towards, you know, our living expenses,
our house, or our car, or what have you.
And so, if you're making a whole lot of money,
your housing accommodations will grow
to what you can afford to stay at.
All right, so where are we on the impressiveness scale?
>> This one is interesting in that
it analyzes stuff that's right there in front of you.
I like the Twitter one better. >> Yeah.
>> I'm going to keep that at the top
'cause it's more large-scale, and I think
if you extrapolate out from that, it's--
>> Twitter one sounds like a magic trick
that shouldn't be possible.
>> It's got some terrifying implications, too.
>> Yeah, yeah--
>> So I'm going to keep-- >> Twitter's still number one.
[keyboard typing] [whooshing]
The size of human male organs
is inversely proportional
to the expected GDP of many countries.
This was a paper published out of Finland
that was originally conceived as a joke.
And then there was a shocking correlation
between average penis lengths
and the GDP of various countries.
>> It was a joke at first?
>> He started it as a joke and now it's actual published.
At some point, he's like, wow, there is
a definite correlation here.
Not saying that means anything outside
of this appears to be the facts.
>> Okay, so, and again, you say an inverse relation,
the smaller...
>> The more gifted you are in one way,
the less gifted you are financially.
>> A centimeter increase in penis length
corresponds to a 5-7% fall in economic growth.
>> And keep in mind, this is on average,
per country, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Like, I don't know, this seems like a weird,
curious statistical artifact.
>> You know what we should do,
we should get with the guys who drove
by the houses and use the image analysis program, right--
>> And have them analyze other images.
>> And, no, no, no, just do that,
and then correlate it to say, okay,
just by looking at your house, your penis is this big.
And then you put a little thing out in the front yard.
>> I don't think that's how science works.
This one is last place on my leaderboard.
I feel like this is just like, somebody found
a weird thing, although those formulas
look very impressive in the paper.
>> There are actual mathematical formulas.
>> I feel like he's trying to compensate for something
with the very long formulas.
>> Well, you know what they say about mathematicians.
>> Now we know how much money he made.
[whooshing] [keyboard typing]
>> Here's a really fascinating one.
Taking the screams of babies and using those patterns
of escalation when dealing with their parents
to map out human aggression.
>> This is another one of those
that once you wrap your mind around it,
it kind of does make sense.
Basically the thesis is that what happens
on the micro-scale, essentially happens on the macro-scale.
In other words, you map out the escalation
of a child increasingly getting upset
and adapting to try to get the attention
of a bigger, slower moving, less interested
in taking care of them party,
getting the attention of a parent, in other words--
>> Or a government.
>> Exactly, exactly tracks to in Poland.
You can see the run-up exactly follows
that screaming baby pattern of escalation.
>> Timing and intensity.
>> And Mother Russia just takes longer and longer
to turn around and do anything about it.
That same pattern also happens in, get this,
predatory traders on the stock market,
as they do a run-up trying to take over GE,
a General Electric, at one point.
And according to the original article
even the Bloody Sunday attacks.
You could see that there was an escalation
that exactly maps onto the way
babies interact with adults.
>> The implications of this are staggering, right?
I think this one is my favorite
because it is an algorithmic model of human aggression.
>> Yeah, this one might be the most capital I
important thing to figure out,
like from a philosophical standpoint.
>> But you can't incorporate it into your show.
>> Well, yes and.
But also, man, predicting the stock market!
What could be a bigger, more bad ass super power than that?
I will give this a solid second place in my leaderboard.
>> If you can predict when a nation-state
is going to have a revolution, and when the government
is going to change hands, or something like that,
the TMZ Cobra part of me thinks that that would be
a pretty powerful thing to have in your arsenal.
>> So I'm going for economic victory,
you're going for military victory of the world.
>> I wouldn't say that the two are that far separate.
>> Yep, all right, crying baby, Twitter.
Six of one, half dozen of another, really.
That's amazing stuff, though.
>> Ryan, they're jamming me up, man.
>> Just because they're carving up the internet
and making a duopoly doesn't mean
that you have to take it lying down.
>> MySpace is keeping me from getting my message out.
>> I'm sorry, MySpace? >> Yes.
>> Wait, hold on. >> The social medias, man.
>> That's not great, because you're not in control
of any of that, if you really want to be smart
you'll make your own website,
and I know what you're about to say.
>> But my-- >> It's hard, it's complicated.
>> You're making it complicated,
I'm going to have to take you out of my Top 8.
>> I don't even think that's a thing anymore,
but I'm pretty sure that you can see everything
that you want to put out to the world
if you have your own website, and it's easy
and beautiful if you use our friends over at Squarespace.
>> So you're saying if I've got my own website
that I'm not going to be, like, choked
and throttled by the algorithms that keep me
from getting my message out?
>> I'll promise that you're independent media
will be out there for the whole world to see.
That your message'll be heard and that
it will look beautiful, and it's easy to do
if you go to squarespace.com/rogue.
Sign up for a free trial, make your own website,
you can put your own Top 8.
Heck, you could put your own Top 25 on there.
It's up to you.
You get to do whatever you want because you're not
beholden to some corporate overlord.
>> If I had, let's say for instance,
a video of knives, cut to Sugar Ray's "Fly",
and I put it right there on the top,
everybody could see it?
The social medias wouldn't say,
well no, let's not show this one.
>> Now all of a sudden I really want
to see you go to Squarespace and design
a Jason Murphy website that actually looks
exactly like a MySpace page.
Which is something you could do using
the templates over at Squarespace.com.
>> Squarespace.com/rogue, that's r-o-g-u-e,
what do you get?
>> 10% off if you use that code!
And two-week trial.
>> Buy some knives.
They're really quality knives.
>> I want to see this website.
You know what I want to find out is whether
that same formula of crying babies applies
to YouTube comments.
No?
>> Brant's going to cut that out.
>> Every comment is a gift.
They're a miracle, just every comment is a miracle.
>> They're all beautiful, thoughtful.