September 28, 2025 • 14 mins
Or, how to spot when someone is building a bamboo control tower - Osher gives some thoughts about correlation, causation, the questions that challenge bad science, and the recent announcement in the US about the link between paracetamol and autism (which there isn't).
For more from Osher, including info on his new book (and his less new book) plus tickets to Story Club and more, head here.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Get a welcome to the show. This is better than yesterday.
Useful tools and useful conversations to make your day to
day better than yesterday. Every week in twenty thirteen min Amsoswiginsburg,
thank you so much for being here. It's been a
hell of a week to turn your phone on my phone,
I mean, just the other day, to turn my phone
on it. There's there's a bloviating, large orange man saying
(00:24):
that paracetam or causes autism. And I just kind of
staggered back a little bit and I hang on, hang
on a second. Look. First things first, it doesn't. And
I thought, I don't know if this person understands that
there is a very big difference between correlation and causation.
(00:45):
To put it, simply, just because this thing happens right
after that thing, or that this thing happened at the
same time as that thing, does not mean that this
thing is caused by that thing. Paracetamol causes autism about
as much as a bamboo control tower causes planes to
(01:06):
drop food from the sky. During World War II, the
Allied forces are the American Australians kiwis. They set up
military bases right across the Pacific places that had yet
really to have a lot of contact with modern, industrial,
mechanized civilization, places like Espiru, Santo in Vanua to Papua
(01:26):
New Guinea islands across Melanesia. They became strategic staging posts
for these did vast militaries and these indigenous communities from
these very remote islands. They've been living their own sophisticated
lives for thousands of years, and just the sudden arrival
of tens of thousands of troops at a time, with
(01:47):
hundreds of thousands of personnel, you know, passing through their
home over the course of the war, it was utterly
overwhelming to them. We think about it from the perspective
of them and their culture. These strange looking people arrive
and within weeks transformed their islands. Bulldoze and build runways,
They build all these towers, They string up wires, they
(02:08):
speak into boxes, they make marks on paper. Then steal
birds appear out of the sky, bringing unimaginable wealth tin food, medicine,
fabric tools, machines, and for communities that were largely subsistence farmers,
bit of root vegetables, fish you get off the reef,
(02:30):
the amount of food that suddenly showed up. It produced
an economy of abundance unlike anything they've ever seen before.
But the people who lived there, these islanders, they weren't
passive observers. They worked alongside the troops. They learned how
to drive jeeps, They helped build the infrastructure. They watched
everything very very carefully, and because they're intelligent people trying
to understand a completely new system that has been dropped
(02:54):
on top of their world. When the war ended suddenly
in nineteen forty five, almost of a night, the bases
were abandoned. The flow of goods and food just stopped.
But the communities, they'd made a very reasonable observation. Specific
activities preceded the arrival of cargo planes come by. They
(03:19):
drop a crate with a parashute on it, opened the
crate up, amazing shits inside. So they did what made
perfect sense with the incomplete information that they had. In Tanna,
in Vanawatu, there was a religious movement that emerged, and
it was called John from Friu and John From as
in John from America. Now, this movement believed in a
(03:42):
prophet called John from who was said to be like
a spirit or an American serviceman who promised that if
the people rejected the missionaries restrictions and returned to their
traditional customs, things like carb rituals and ceremonial dances that
the missionaries had, you know, banned them doing, if they
rejected those missionary things and they would turned to the
(04:04):
local customs, then John from would bring the abundance. And
it was described as cargo. You know, this manufactured goods.
So if they did this thing, this stuff would fall
from this guy. And so the believers they built airstrips,
bamboo control towers. They built things that looked like radios,
but just you know, the shapes of these things, they
(04:25):
didn't work. They were made of raw materials like bamboo
and pandanus palms and whatever. They dressed in replica US
Army uniforms. They performed the parade drills that they'd seen.
And it didn't just happen in one place in popworn Ne, Guinea.
Across Melanesia, similar things popped up communities. They carved headphones
(04:46):
made out of wood that they'd seen the control tower
people wearing. They created runways with torches lit along them.
They built life size aeroplanes made from straw and wood,
and there was an anthropologist who observed a list, a
bloke called Peter Worsley. I studied these movements quite extensively,
and he noticed that these these weren't random memoricies of
(05:06):
what was going on. There were systemic attempts to recreate
an observed cause and effect. And when Australian patrol officers
visited some of these communities in the fifties and sixties,
they found really sophisticated theological practical frameworks to explain why
the cargo should come. But what has this got to
(05:27):
do with paracetamol? These communities were doing exactly what our
brains are wired to do, identify patterns and take action
based on those patterns. It's the same mechanism that made
our ancestors think every time we see a particular kind
of cloud, the one that looks like that it's going
to rain, and that's actually quite useful, especially when you're
starting a farm or wanting to find shelter. The problem
(05:51):
really is that our pattern recognition software hasn't really had
an update in hundreds of thousands of years, and now
this pattern recognition system is trying to make sense of
rising autism rates and over the counter painkillers, the parasitamo
autism claim, which is not real. It follows the same
script because yes, paracetamol use has increased over the decades,
(06:14):
and yes, autism diagnoses have also increased. But you know
what else has increased? Mobile phone usage, the sale of
organic food, the number of people who have collectively watched
the Office, the American One. By the same logic, the
relationship between Jim and Pam causes autism in babies. It's
(06:35):
a very big difference between correlation and causation. We're not
so different. If someone wins big on the horses, right,
they will gone to the races, And so they brought
some red socks with tiny horseshoes on them, and they
put a bet on the boom multi paid off. Oh
my god, I won this bet because I've got my
horseshoe socks on. Dam every time I word these socks winning.
(06:56):
Next week go back to the races, same socks loses
hundreds of bucks. Week after, same socks loses rent money.
Where it gets interesting is the person who's gambling doesn't
blame the socks. Instead, they will decide, oh, I must
have put them on in the wrong order, or I
(07:17):
didn't wear the right andes as well. I know that
day I ate three week bicks and this day I
ate four. That's the thing, that sort of thing, that
sort of justification, that rationalization, that is your brain building
its own bamboo control tower. You're trying to recreate the
conditions that brought the planes, or in this case, you're
multi paying off, but you're focusing on all the wrong things.
(07:42):
Sometimes five million to one odds, that's what one in
five million looks like. Sometimes it pays off. But we
do this all over the place. So you had a
really good presentation at work. Oh, that must have been
the PowerPoint template, not the months of preparation I put
into the presentation. My kid slept all the way through
the night, amazing had to be that very specific bedtime routine,
(08:04):
and then the exact lullabye that I sang them, Like, No,
they just might have been developmentally ready, or your headache
went away, or it must have been that really expensive
supplement that I got from the natural path, not that
I finally drank some water and got off my phone.
But when someone with credentials, someone with authority, claims something
(08:25):
false like parasitam or cause autism, which it doesn't. They're
not just building a harmless bamboo control tower. They are
potentially convincing parents and pregnant women across the world to
suffer through fever and pain unnecessarily, both of which are
dangerous to unborn children. They're adding another layeristigma to parents
who are already navigating the complex world of raising a
(08:46):
neurodivers child, and they're muddying the waters the actual researchers
are trying to navigate to get a better understanding of
things like Buddhism. The confusion between coudization and correlation isn't
just bad science, it's real, really, really harmful, and it
diverts resources from the real research. The real science around
this stuff, i should say, is very very different. There
(09:09):
was this humongous study done in Sweden that analyzed over
two point four million children born between ninety ninety five
and twenty nineteen, and they compared children born to the
same mum where paracetamol use was different between her pregnancy,
so she did take it during one pregnancy did not
during the other one. So they didn't just look at
who took paracetamol and who had autistic children. They compared siblings.
(09:31):
All right, Now, if paracetamol caused autism, you would expect
to see differences between the siblings, but they did not.
They found no evidence that the paracetamol used during the
pregnancy increases any risk of autism. And while they were
down there, they also found no link to ADHD or
intellectual disability. And this is a state analyzing of two
point four million children. There were some earlier studies that
(09:54):
suggested a link, but they were unable to separate the
paracetamol use from why the people were taking the paris
stamore pain fever, infection, all really valid reasons to take
paracetamol and all things that also might affect development of
a baby independently. Like that kind of research, all that
kind of finding. That's kind of like blaming umbrellas for
(10:16):
car accidents, because you see lots of umbrellas on rainy days, right,
But I get it, I get it. It's hard to
get your head out of fear and into facts, especially
when you're talking about kids. We survive because our brains
are correlation spotting machines running on hardware that evolved when
distinguishing between the rustle of the wind and the rustle
(10:38):
of a predator in the bushes was literally life and death.
We're programmed to see patterns even when they are not there.
But luckily we've evolved to ask questions, ask important questions.
Four of them. Could something explain both of these things?
For example, better and more ular diagnoses criteria explain rising
(11:03):
autism rates, not paracetamol? What is the mechanism, how does
it happen? How exactly does the paracetamol cause this? Where
is the pathway? Have you tested it? Have you compared
groups with and without the thing? We're testing for it
and controlling for any other variables. Very important to ask
question who benefits from this claim? Is someone trying to
(11:25):
sell a book or sell a supplement or an alternative,
or is someone just trying to destabilize things so chaos.
We can actually learn a lot from our Pacific neighbors.
What's really interesting about these cargo cults, which is what
they were called, not only is how these belief systems
and these practices how they emerge, but it's also how
(11:46):
the communities involve eventually moved past them. And it wasn't
through ridicule or making fun of them or forced education.
It happened through an exchange of information economic development, and
most importantly, when the local leaders integrated this new understanding
about the world into the existing knowledge that they have,
(12:06):
they move past colo cousts because they gained access to
the full picture. Once these communities understood global economics, colonialism,
supply chains, the bamboo reports became unnecessary. The problem is,
even though we have access to better information, sometimes we
(12:28):
can tend to choose the simple story instead, usually the
one that makes us feel the safest or the most
in control. But that doesn't mean it's real. So if
you hear a claim like well, X causes why take
a moment look and see if there's any bamboo control
towels around. Ask yourself, are you seeing causation or just correlation?
(12:50):
In a makeshift uniform marching around with a wooden pair
of headphones waiting for a plane that was never coming
in the first place. Because under standing the difference between
correlation and causation isn't about being scientifically literate. It's about
making better decisions, about asking better questions, and not torturing
itself with guilt over the paracetamol you took more than
(13:13):
you were pregnant because you had a fever. The planes
came in the first place because of complex geopolitical forces
that no one could have predicted, long long supply chains,
intricate and very very intense military strategy. They did not
arrive because someone marched in the right pattern. And as
(13:38):
far as autism is concerned, well, there's no single known cause.
It is complicated. They may include genetics and environmental factors,
but we know and it's been proven that they definitely
do not include paracetamol. I hope that's useful, and I
(13:58):
hope the next time you remember someone making a bold
claim like that, look for the bamboo control tower. Thank
you so much for listening. Thanks to Adam A. Bunch
who produces episode. I'll see you on Wednesday.
Get a welcome to the show. This is better than yesterday.
Useful tools and useful conversations to make your day to
day better than yesterday. Every week in twenty thirteen min Amsoswiginsburg,
thank you so much for being here. It's been a
hell of a week to turn your phone on my phone,
I mean, just the other day, to turn my phone
on it. There's there's a bloviating, large orange man saying
(00:24):
that paracetam or causes autism. And I just kind of
staggered back a little bit and I hang on, hang
on a second. Look. First things first, it doesn't. And
I thought, I don't know if this person understands that
there is a very big difference between correlation and causation.
(00:45):
To put it, simply, just because this thing happens right
after that thing, or that this thing happened at the
same time as that thing, does not mean that this
thing is caused by that thing. Paracetamol causes autism about
as much as a bamboo control tower causes planes to
(01:06):
drop food from the sky. During World War II, the
Allied forces are the American Australians kiwis. They set up
military bases right across the Pacific places that had yet
really to have a lot of contact with modern, industrial,
mechanized civilization, places like Espiru, Santo in Vanua to Papua
(01:26):
New Guinea islands across Melanesia. They became strategic staging posts
for these did vast militaries and these indigenous communities from
these very remote islands. They've been living their own sophisticated
lives for thousands of years, and just the sudden arrival
of tens of thousands of troops at a time, with
(01:47):
hundreds of thousands of personnel, you know, passing through their
home over the course of the war, it was utterly
overwhelming to them. We think about it from the perspective
of them and their culture. These strange looking people arrive
and within weeks transformed their islands. Bulldoze and build runways,
They build all these towers, They string up wires, they
(02:08):
speak into boxes, they make marks on paper. Then steal
birds appear out of the sky, bringing unimaginable wealth tin food, medicine,
fabric tools, machines, and for communities that were largely subsistence farmers,
bit of root vegetables, fish you get off the reef,
(02:30):
the amount of food that suddenly showed up. It produced
an economy of abundance unlike anything they've ever seen before.
But the people who lived there, these islanders, they weren't
passive observers. They worked alongside the troops. They learned how
to drive jeeps, They helped build the infrastructure. They watched
everything very very carefully, and because they're intelligent people trying
to understand a completely new system that has been dropped
(02:54):
on top of their world. When the war ended suddenly
in nineteen forty five, almost of a night, the bases
were abandoned. The flow of goods and food just stopped.
But the communities, they'd made a very reasonable observation. Specific
activities preceded the arrival of cargo planes come by. They
(03:19):
drop a crate with a parashute on it, opened the
crate up, amazing shits inside. So they did what made
perfect sense with the incomplete information that they had. In Tanna,
in Vanawatu, there was a religious movement that emerged, and
it was called John from Friu and John From as
in John from America. Now, this movement believed in a
(03:42):
prophet called John from who was said to be like
a spirit or an American serviceman who promised that if
the people rejected the missionaries restrictions and returned to their
traditional customs, things like carb rituals and ceremonial dances that
the missionaries had, you know, banned them doing, if they
rejected those missionary things and they would turned to the
(04:04):
local customs, then John from would bring the abundance. And
it was described as cargo. You know, this manufactured goods.
So if they did this thing, this stuff would fall
from this guy. And so the believers they built airstrips,
bamboo control towers. They built things that looked like radios,
but just you know, the shapes of these things, they
(04:25):
didn't work. They were made of raw materials like bamboo
and pandanus palms and whatever. They dressed in replica US
Army uniforms. They performed the parade drills that they'd seen.
And it didn't just happen in one place in popworn Ne, Guinea.
Across Melanesia, similar things popped up communities. They carved headphones
(04:46):
made out of wood that they'd seen the control tower
people wearing. They created runways with torches lit along them.
They built life size aeroplanes made from straw and wood,
and there was an anthropologist who observed a list, a
bloke called Peter Worsley. I studied these movements quite extensively,
and he noticed that these these weren't random memoricies of
(05:06):
what was going on. There were systemic attempts to recreate
an observed cause and effect. And when Australian patrol officers
visited some of these communities in the fifties and sixties,
they found really sophisticated theological practical frameworks to explain why
the cargo should come. But what has this got to
(05:27):
do with paracetamol? These communities were doing exactly what our
brains are wired to do, identify patterns and take action
based on those patterns. It's the same mechanism that made
our ancestors think every time we see a particular kind
of cloud, the one that looks like that it's going
to rain, and that's actually quite useful, especially when you're
starting a farm or wanting to find shelter. The problem
(05:51):
really is that our pattern recognition software hasn't really had
an update in hundreds of thousands of years, and now
this pattern recognition system is trying to make sense of
rising autism rates and over the counter painkillers, the parasitamo
autism claim, which is not real. It follows the same
script because yes, paracetamol use has increased over the decades,
(06:14):
and yes, autism diagnoses have also increased. But you know
what else has increased? Mobile phone usage, the sale of
organic food, the number of people who have collectively watched
the Office, the American One. By the same logic, the
relationship between Jim and Pam causes autism in babies. It's
(06:35):
a very big difference between correlation and causation. We're not
so different. If someone wins big on the horses, right,
they will gone to the races, And so they brought
some red socks with tiny horseshoes on them, and they
put a bet on the boom multi paid off. Oh
my god, I won this bet because I've got my
horseshoe socks on. Dam every time I word these socks winning.
(06:56):
Next week go back to the races, same socks loses
hundreds of bucks. Week after, same socks loses rent money.
Where it gets interesting is the person who's gambling doesn't
blame the socks. Instead, they will decide, oh, I must
have put them on in the wrong order, or I
(07:17):
didn't wear the right andes as well. I know that
day I ate three week bicks and this day I
ate four. That's the thing, that sort of thing, that
sort of justification, that rationalization, that is your brain building
its own bamboo control tower. You're trying to recreate the
conditions that brought the planes, or in this case, you're
multi paying off, but you're focusing on all the wrong things.
(07:42):
Sometimes five million to one odds, that's what one in
five million looks like. Sometimes it pays off. But we
do this all over the place. So you had a
really good presentation at work. Oh, that must have been
the PowerPoint template, not the months of preparation I put
into the presentation. My kid slept all the way through
the night, amazing had to be that very specific bedtime routine,
(08:04):
and then the exact lullabye that I sang them, Like, No,
they just might have been developmentally ready, or your headache
went away, or it must have been that really expensive
supplement that I got from the natural path, not that
I finally drank some water and got off my phone.
But when someone with credentials, someone with authority, claims something
(08:25):
false like parasitam or cause autism, which it doesn't. They're
not just building a harmless bamboo control tower. They are
potentially convincing parents and pregnant women across the world to
suffer through fever and pain unnecessarily, both of which are
dangerous to unborn children. They're adding another layeristigma to parents
who are already navigating the complex world of raising a
(08:46):
neurodivers child, and they're muddying the waters the actual researchers
are trying to navigate to get a better understanding of
things like Buddhism. The confusion between coudization and correlation isn't
just bad science, it's real, really, really harmful, and it
diverts resources from the real research. The real science around
this stuff, i should say, is very very different. There
(09:09):
was this humongous study done in Sweden that analyzed over
two point four million children born between ninety ninety five
and twenty nineteen, and they compared children born to the
same mum where paracetamol use was different between her pregnancy,
so she did take it during one pregnancy did not
during the other one. So they didn't just look at
who took paracetamol and who had autistic children. They compared siblings.
(09:31):
All right, Now, if paracetamol caused autism, you would expect
to see differences between the siblings, but they did not.
They found no evidence that the paracetamol used during the
pregnancy increases any risk of autism. And while they were
down there, they also found no link to ADHD or
intellectual disability. And this is a state analyzing of two
point four million children. There were some earlier studies that
(09:54):
suggested a link, but they were unable to separate the
paracetamol use from why the people were taking the paris
stamore pain fever, infection, all really valid reasons to take
paracetamol and all things that also might affect development of
a baby independently. Like that kind of research, all that
kind of finding. That's kind of like blaming umbrellas for
(10:16):
car accidents, because you see lots of umbrellas on rainy days, right,
But I get it, I get it. It's hard to
get your head out of fear and into facts, especially
when you're talking about kids. We survive because our brains
are correlation spotting machines running on hardware that evolved when
distinguishing between the rustle of the wind and the rustle
(10:38):
of a predator in the bushes was literally life and death.
We're programmed to see patterns even when they are not there.
But luckily we've evolved to ask questions, ask important questions.
Four of them. Could something explain both of these things?
For example, better and more ular diagnoses criteria explain rising
(11:03):
autism rates, not paracetamol? What is the mechanism, how does
it happen? How exactly does the paracetamol cause this? Where
is the pathway? Have you tested it? Have you compared
groups with and without the thing? We're testing for it
and controlling for any other variables. Very important to ask
question who benefits from this claim? Is someone trying to
(11:25):
sell a book or sell a supplement or an alternative,
or is someone just trying to destabilize things so chaos.
We can actually learn a lot from our Pacific neighbors.
What's really interesting about these cargo cults, which is what
they were called, not only is how these belief systems
and these practices how they emerge, but it's also how
(11:46):
the communities involve eventually moved past them. And it wasn't
through ridicule or making fun of them or forced education.
It happened through an exchange of information economic development, and
most importantly, when the local leaders integrated this new understanding
about the world into the existing knowledge that they have,
(12:06):
they move past colo cousts because they gained access to
the full picture. Once these communities understood global economics, colonialism,
supply chains, the bamboo reports became unnecessary. The problem is,
even though we have access to better information, sometimes we
(12:28):
can tend to choose the simple story instead, usually the
one that makes us feel the safest or the most
in control. But that doesn't mean it's real. So if
you hear a claim like well, X causes why take
a moment look and see if there's any bamboo control
towels around. Ask yourself, are you seeing causation or just correlation?
(12:50):
In a makeshift uniform marching around with a wooden pair
of headphones waiting for a plane that was never coming
in the first place. Because under standing the difference between
correlation and causation isn't about being scientifically literate. It's about
making better decisions, about asking better questions, and not torturing
itself with guilt over the paracetamol you took more than
(13:13):
you were pregnant because you had a fever. The planes
came in the first place because of complex geopolitical forces
that no one could have predicted, long long supply chains,
intricate and very very intense military strategy. They did not
arrive because someone marched in the right pattern. And as
(13:38):
far as autism is concerned, well, there's no single known cause.
It is complicated. They may include genetics and environmental factors,
but we know and it's been proven that they definitely
do not include paracetamol. I hope that's useful, and I
(13:58):
hope the next time you remember someone making a bold
claim like that, look for the bamboo control tower. Thank
you so much for listening. Thanks to Adam A. Bunch
who produces episode. I'll see you on Wednesday.
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