Mm.

Mm.

uh.

. .

Mm.

P on down into the middle of the parties and

And the cool, we're gonna be cool, we're gonna be a bit they went tired. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 283. Oh, When Mary C. Murphy was in graduate school at Stanford earning her degree in social psychology. She attended one of these end-of-the-year

review seminar things to support one of her friends. It's one of these events where students earning their degrees will present their work so far to professors and when Mary attended one of these

She noticed something that seemed peculiar.

This review ritual, this review ritual, this tradition, it's an event where students in different areas of study

like cognitive psychology or neuroscience or in Mary C Murphy's case, Social Psychology, gather by area research and present their work on their

dissertations.

It's kind of like a science fair, but also kind of like a TED Talk lots of slides, lots of

Diagrams and graphs and things except the professors ask questions and make remarks and then convene to make more remarks among themselves and then offer revisions major and minor to the work and it's a big deal for people in grad school trying to earn their

PhDs and the stakes are very high and so are the stress levels among the

students.

And you know every psychology seminar has their own presentation schedule and I was in one

visiting a friend who was giving his talk at the end of his fourth year in the PhD program.

And he's up there and all of a sudden he's interrupted by a faculty member sitting over on the right.

And the faculty member just doesn't even raise his hand, course just yells out well it's clear the fatal flaw is XYZ and then another professor over on the left he says no it YZ, it's clearly ABC. I mean if he solved

A B C then the X YZ wouldn't even matter. They started fighting about how

...