Shownotes
Summer is here and in this week’s podcast we decided to weigh in on an age-old question: which is the most annoying insect?
We discuss the different species of cricket, explore data on the most annoying sounds, the flight strategies of mosquitoes, psychological warfare and how transitive inference is used by wasps. Peter presents his framework for insect annoyingness, while Nick presents an alternative framework that drills down into the concept of annoyingness itself. Finally, we share our findings and reveal our favourite insects.
A few things we mentioned in this podcast:
- Noise Nuisances of the Nation
- 7 Of The Loudest Insects In The World Ranked By Decibels
- The 10 Most Annoying Sounds and Why They Bother Us
- You Bug Me. Now Science Explains Why
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Transcripts
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill, Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing which is the most annoying insect. Nick, which is the most annoying insect? It's summer now. It is. And a time of insects. There's only gonna be two on this, aren't there? But anyway, keep going. No, no, no. Well, I've got at least three, but I was relaxing in my living room the other day, reading the paper or something and being slightly half drifting off to sleep. Yes. And then a housefly comes in. Really big one, you know, that really annoying thing of like, it would go for a bit and then and just as I would get up to kill it, it would disappear and switch its cloaking device.
Speaker B:Did it find a window, though?
Speaker A:No. Well, it was still, it obviously had not listened to our- Did it bugger it? You put the flipping windows up, open the windows, the idiot doesn't get out of it. But, you know, and every time I got up determined to kill it, it would literally do that thing where it would put its cloaking device on. It would be over by that window and I'd walk up to that window. And as soon as I got there, it would suddenly drop below the window and disappear. There was no following it. And, you know, it drove me, I thought at that time, houseflies are the worst. I absolutely hate them. But are houseflies the worst or is there a worse insect out there? I don't know. So I think this is a two minute podcast. Houseflies are not the worst. They're up there, but surely it's got to be a big competition between the big beasts here, which is the mosquitoes and the wasps. Well, let's- Chris, Peter?
Speaker C:Well, I've sort of designed a framework to judge things by. So we're going for annoying, right? Well, yeah, we might want to drill into what that means. It's not like being deadly or being anything else.
Speaker A:Well, I think deadliness would, if houseflies were deadly, I think they would be more annoying.
Speaker C:Well, I think deadliness, the more deadly it is, the less annoying it becomes, the more deadly it becomes, the more dangerous it becomes. OK, that's interesting.
Speaker B:I'm with Peter on that.
Speaker C:So I've got four scales. Four. I've got four as well. Four dimensions to annoying this. You've got a framework as well.
Speaker A:Oh yeah, you've got to design a framework. You can't do this without a proper framework. Oh my God, I'm feeling like I'm the only person sitting in the room without my duck. Yeah, get your framework out. This is Aleph Insights, do you remember?
Speaker C:Here it is. There we go. Got it. Yeah.
Speaker A:Actually, before we carry on.
Speaker C:That's about as much thought as I put into mine. Right, OK.
Speaker A:Do you want to keep going or Chris?
Speaker C:Well, let me describe my dimensions of annoyingness. And then maybe we can go around.
Speaker A:Out of interest, Peter, is this just insects or could this be applied to any phenomenon?
Speaker C:It could pretty much be applied to any phenomenon.
Speaker A:All right. So you describe it. As you describe it, I'm going to apply it to something mildly irritating, which is a moped.
Speaker C:OK, yeah. OK, there are four dimensions. Dimension one. Called this temporal inappropriateness. Ah. Right. So this is when it tends to come in terms of, this is just a linear scale, right? In terms of like when you least want it to come. So more annoying things come when you don't want them.
Speaker A:Yeah, OK. Well, I reckon this is just I'm out on the street and it's not that surprising. So this is probably a zero or one.
Speaker C:Yeah, OK, right. Then I've called it tickliness is the next dimension. And hang on. I think a moped isn't that tickly at all. Well, hold on. I think that's a zero.
Speaker A:How about let Peter do his. I want to hear this. Well, I'm trialing it out. Well, yeah, but maybe it doesn't apply to everything. All right.
Speaker C:Tickliness, right. So there's there's two ends of the spectrum. There's sort of no tickly. And then there's the far end is discomfort. So it actually causes you pain. Right. In order to get a maximum score, you could be somewhere in. You've got to be in the middle. So there's a sort of normal distribution.
Speaker A:Stick some insects on there. So what's tickly? A wasp's tickle is a kind of a sting.
Speaker C:So if it's a wasp sting, a hornet sting would be way up there. Like a mosquito doesn't actually hurt when it does it. But it lasts a long time as well. But yeah, I've got another dimension for that. So the fourth dimension. So basically tickliness is if it's sort of like how much how kind of sort of discomfort it causes you without being pain.
Speaker B:Does it have to be in the haptic sensory dimension or could that apply also to noise, for example?
Speaker C:Yeah, I've put tickliness in. I couldn't find a word for it, but it's like it's kind of like discomfort before it becomes painful. That has to be physical. If it becomes painful, then it gets a low score. And if there's no unpleasant sensation, maybe it's unpleasantness. If there's no unpleasant sensation, then you get a low score. But it's got to be an actual sweet spot in the middle. I'm getting a bit annoyed by this framework. And then there's unignorability is the next dimension. Right. Okay.
Speaker A:I think some of these might be aligned somehow.
Speaker C:But anyway, go on. Yeah, so if you can't ignore it, obviously it's annoying. But this is to do with how threatening it is rather than how noisy it is. If there's no threat at all, obviously it's going to get a low score. But if it's deadly, then it goes on the deadly scale. So it's got to be somewhere again, this sort of sweet spot to get a high score. And then finally, we've got lingering-ness. Yes. This is how long...
Speaker A:I think someone needs to work on the names of these dimensions.
Speaker C:The lingering-ness is how long the effect lasts for. Duration.
Speaker A:I would go with duration for that one. I prefer lingering-ness. Okay, lingering-ness. No, I like lingering-ness.
Speaker C:Yeah, I'm deliberately finding flippant names. Anyway, so this is like how long it lasts for. So a mosquito bite could last for days and be really quite itchy. Whereas a wasp sting, you might get over in a couple of hours. But if it's deadly, is that like infinite duration then? If it's deadly, it gets a low score on the deadly scale.
Speaker A:Which one of these is the deadly scale? We've got temporal inappropriateness, tickliness, unignorability.
Speaker C:Deadliness appears on unignorability. If it's deadly, it actually gets a very low unignorability score because it's not annoying.
Speaker A:Can I just say, I can see some little diagrams as well. I'd say this is slightly baffling. Yeah.
Speaker B:But an insight into Peter's mind.
Speaker A:Can I just say also, this is another one of those episodes where it's brutally revealed, you know, the difference between me and you lot. But I don't think, I think Peter shouldn't reveal the answers. No, quite, quite. Okay, because I've got a few. Yeah, go for it, Nick. Well, so I think I've tried to think about what annoyingness consists of. Peter's had a stab there with four things. We might be able to do better by thinking about it for more than three minutes. But let's have a look. So if we start with the things that people profess to find annoying, right? So up there is chewing, chewing noises, construction noises, alarms going off, children screaming, snoring. That would be right up there for me. Slurping drinks.
Speaker C:What's this got to do with insects?
Speaker A:Because do you know the question is, what's the most annoying insect? So we want to understand what annoying means to help answer that, right? So therefore, you don't even need to talk about children screaming unless they're being attacked by insects. These are things that people find annoying. Let us start with that and ask what it is that unites them. Once we understand what insects are. Yeah. So it's like if I said to you, okay, what's the reddest, you know, type of fruit? You'd need to say, what does red mean? And you might start by asking what is it that unites red objects and then formulate. Okay, so. I shouldn't have told you, keep going. Barking dogs, sniffing, dripping taps and insects, right? So the insects are on that list. So let's have a look at that and ask what it is. Well, first of all, they're noisy. You might think that's a theory. Perhaps it's noisiness, which we're talking about. But if you look at the loudest insects in the world, actually, all of the loudest insects aren't ones that I don't think most people find annoying, like cicadas, which quite a pleasant noise.
Speaker B:They're usually a long way away from you up in a tree, though.
Speaker A:Well, that's true. But then you also have crickets. I didn't know this, but you know, in America, they call them katydids. What? Yeah. Apparently it's because katydid sounds a bit like the noise they make. And I was like, what the hell are you talking about?
Speaker B:It wasn't Jimmy Katydid, though, was it? Well, no.
Speaker A:What does a poor katydid have to do with this? I'm just saying I think it's only certain kinds of species of cricket, but apparently they do actually sound a bit like they're going katydid, katydid, katydid. Anyway, and so we've essentially got crickets and locusts and cicadas are the noisiest, but they're not that annoying. So, you know, let's put a pin in that because it can't just be the volume. It's got to be something else about the noise. So then I looked at another list of most annoying sounds. So that's noises. But actually, the ones that people say are the most annoying sounds are all something on a something. The top five. They are knife on a bottle, fork on a glass, chalk on a blackboard, ruler on a bottle, and nails on a blackboard. And then you've got some of the other like squealing brakes on a bicycle and stuff. So there is something that unites those. There's a there's that sort of high pitch friction.
Speaker C:I don't think I've got any idea what a ruler on a bottle sounds like. Well, don't try it, Peter. I've never caused to bring two things together.
Speaker A:It'll cause you to go insane. So some of the theories about what makes something irritating or annoying, I think key here, and I think this is going to be important to understanding insect annoyingness is unpredictability. That to me is absolutely key. So things when our brains can fit something into a nice pattern, it's not it ceases to be intrusive. Right. So I think that's why like the cricket noise is almost white noise. But if it isn't, it's a sort of, you know, it's a rhythmic and you've heard it once. Right. So incidentally, I've seen this theory advanced as to explain why it is that hearing one half of a phone call is much more annoying than hearing a full focal because you cannot when you're hearing the conversation, then both halves, then there's nothing unpredictable happening. But with the one half, they'll say something, then you won't know what's going to happen next. And then they'll say something completely different. And so, yeah, so I think this unpredictability is key. So I'm putting that down as one of the things we want to think about. I don't know if. Are there many more? There's a few other things I'll touch on. But we'll bring Chris in. But before we do, I've got a prediction, which I predict, and you must be honest, and I know you will be. I think even with all our different methods, we all get out with the same things, even but also mine as well. And mine will be a way quicker. Process. Yeah. And with the same result. Yeah, but that's because you're unreflectively just using intuition. No, we're trying to understand it. No, we're trying to drill.
Speaker C:Yeah, we're trying to find a way that if you could hand the framework to an alien who's never seen an insect and say, judge these insects, put them in annoying order. No, you're all wrong.
Speaker A:And the reason why is because you're detached from either your emotions or your sensory
Speaker C:perceptions or probably both. I think you're detached from your sanity, Fraser.
Speaker A:He's operating at the kind of brute level of someone who merely perceives the world and thinks that's what it's like.
Speaker B:Like an insect. Yeah, a little bit.
Speaker A:Whereas I think we're trying to drill beneath that and say, why have we evolved to find crickets? Why are flies annoying but crickets aren't, for example?
Speaker B:But the intuition, I think Fraser's point is that intuition is going to give you, it validates our framework in a sense, right? So like there's this black box, which is Fraser's intuition.
Speaker A:Your frameworks validate my thing. But anyway, go on.
Speaker B:Yeah, where we could throw things in and we'd say, right, OK, we scored them on our framework. You know, OK, we've got this thing quite high annoying. And then we give it to Fraser. Fraser, annoying or not annoying? And he says, oh, yeah, that's really annoying. And we go, oh, great, OK, our framework's working. He's the... So I'm like a sum check.
Speaker A:Well, yeah, exactly.
Speaker B:You're the gold standard of annoyance. Our frameworks.
Speaker A:If we put our frameworks together, we'll be able to design the most annoying insect there could be rather than having to choose from ones that are out there. Correct.
Speaker B:We can bypass evolution and go straight.
Speaker A:Yeah. But also we would be of use to, for example, the FBI. Well, I can see that you've got something you want to lead to there. But we don't have to straight away. Exactly. And I should stop being so combative because maybe we can work together on this. And yeah.
Speaker B:But Chris, I believe you have a framework as well. Well, yeah, and I'll pick up on that sort of as we go. But I was just going to come back to a couple of those things that Nick touched on of sound and unpredictability. So that list that Nick gave of knife on a bottle, fork on a glass, et cetera, that study, they looked at activity in the amygdala in the brain using functional MRI scanning while they were basically playing these noises to people. And one of the things they established was that the noises themselves tended to be within a particular sound frequency. So between 2,000 and 5,000 hertz. And so I was thinking about that and I was thinking, well, does that make sense for things that are a little bit higher pitch to be naturally annoying? So the naturally appearing things on that list are the baby crying, the female scream, and you would argue insects are in that bracket. Well, so is it the case that those things are all things that need attendance in some way? But then I thought, well, no, actually, because there are plenty of things that need attending like a bear's growl or an avalanche that you also need to attend to. And I think critical to the point, which Peter didn't get enough credit for, I think, at the beginning was he had a series of dimensions. But he was talking about a sweet spot within. It's not a case of, right, okay, we'll go higher and higher frequency and that gets more and more annoying. Well, at some point, obviously, it disappears out of the audible range. But annoyance is definitely a sweet spot thing, right? Which is like if somebody cut your legs off, you wouldn't say, oh, that was annoying. You know, it would be too much. But if somebody kept sort of, you know, pulling your hair or pinching you or something, you'd be like, that's annoying. So there's like all of these things, I think. And then on unpredictability, I think, you know, the insects themselves, like one of the things about mosquitoes is their flying pattern is deliberately unpredictable, right? To evade predators or indeed they've evolved to avoid slapping hands or tails or, you know, something trying to swap them. And in order to do that, they have an unpredictable flying pattern. They, you know, they quickly, agilely move from left to right. And that's why you get that sort of and then it disappears and it kind of comes back again and you hear it getting a bit closer and then a bit further away. And then it's like a doodle bug, isn't it? Because it goes quiet and then you know they're on you.
Speaker A:And at that point, you start thrashing around wildly trying to get it off you.
Speaker B:Like this has been, you know, quite deeply studied because of malaria and things like that, how to trap mosquitoes. And these things are incredibly sophisticated for something that has obviously a tiny cognitive capacity. The flight strategies of a mosquito and the hiding strategies and so on are incredibly sophisticated.
Speaker A:How many times have you been looking for a mosquito? Yeah, it's right behind you on the bed board.
Speaker B:So they do have a hiding strategy of when you swap them, they go into a hiding mode. And anyway, so I think unpredictability is a big one. And that makes sense, you know, from the point of view of, well, it's something that you can't just predictably leave to one side, right? Of like, OK, either it's doing this or isn't doing this. And I know it's kind of it's demanding of your attention.
Speaker A:I think there's a really, there's a really intriguing thing here. Which, so a couple of thoughts. Firstly, bears are scarier than a mosquito, right? Yes. But I think, so I think it's right. Mosquitoes kill more people. So just, oh not that again. The old anti mosquito conspiracy theory. Did you know mosquitoes are more deadly than tigers? I don't care. I can put up with a mosquito. If you saw a tiger. Yeah.
Speaker C:We'd rather fight one mosquito-sized bear or one million bear-sized mosquitoes. Well, hold on though, Nick. Exactly, exactly.
Speaker A:But before I hold on, can I finish my point? So the point is that in actual physics, small things make higher pitch noises than big things, right? Big things are going to kill you. Little things are going to irritate you. I think there's a matter of sort of, you know, you don't, most insects aren't going to kill you, but they're going to irritate you. Literally, they might give you a bite or sting or something. So it makes sense that our response to those noises should be different. Our response to a deep growl should be fear. And our response to a high-pitched whine should be some kind of other thing, which is actually, I need to attend to this, but it's not going to kill me. And it's like the baby crying, woman screaming, both things that you need to pay attention to, but not scary, right? So I think it makes sense, actually, that there is a difference if when you lower the frequency, you end up with a different emotional response. That is explained by the evolutionary environment in a way. But wouldn't it make sense, therefore, you're all about being rational, wouldn't it make sense if you were in Africa 100 years ago and you heard this, that you should be running faster away from that than you should be from, I don't know, an alligator? No, because you... Isn't it more dangerous? I don't know. What, an alligator? If you get eaten by an alligator, you're definitely dead. But if you get bitten by a mosquito, you might have malaria, and even that might not kill you. But there's going to be probably a higher volume of mosquitoes after you than there are alligators. Well, I suppose what I'm saying is the response is different. Let's just say that. The response is different. And so it makes... I don't know. I feel like Chris has raised this kind of challenge, which is, well, why don't we find the sound of a bear irritating? But actually, I think it makes sense when you think about, well, it's not nothing. We don't ignore a bear growling. We just have a different response to it. And that's quite right, because a bear is a different kind of threat. Oh, those bloody bears. Yeah. So there's that. No, but the other thing that it prompted me to think was, well, actually, in the natural world, it's only really insects that make that noise. Like, these days, we find mopeds and alarms irritating. Put mopeds aside for a minute, but alarms are almost designed to... They're designed to hit our irritation zone. Right? So it makes sense that an alarm is going to sound like those things that we've evolved to find annoying. That's the whole point of an alarm. And so...
Speaker C:Certain forms of pop music also. Well, precisely.
Speaker A:So when we say, why are insects irritating? It's like, no, actually, irritating, in terms of the context of noise, is insects. We've evolved that specific emotion to deal with insects. That does make sense. Nice. Yes. We've not talked about persistence, actually, I think. Isn't that something as well that can be annoying?
Speaker B:I think Peter touched on it a little bit when he talked about... Lingering. Well, that's a bit...
Speaker A:Well, it depends what you mean by lingering.
Speaker B:So the effect of, like, a mosquito bite lingers, but also the... I think in the moment. Yes, exactly. It's not there for one second. It's there for the entirety of the time you're trying to go back. Lingers longer after you've dealt with it as well.
Speaker C:I was comparing things. I was wanting to find some way of differentiating between, say, ants, which are highly tick... You know, they're on a tickly scale. They're pretty high. Definitely don't want them in your pants. But as long as they're not biting ants, they're not fire ants or anything like that. They're just our little European ants, which are small and weedy. Once they've brushed it off, the effect is gone. Compared to a mosquito or a wasp, you have an itch or a painful sting.
Speaker A:Also, ants are 2D, aren't they? There's only two dimensions to worry about an ant. But with a mosquito, it's got the Z dimension, which is particularly annoying. The Z dimension.
Speaker C:Even more annoying insect would be one that could travel in four dimensions. Right.
Speaker A:It could bite you and then go back in time to bite you yesterday.
Speaker C:Step left a bit and it would be outside of our perception.
Speaker A:Where are we? Time-travelling mosquito. Well, it wouldn't need to time-travel.
Speaker C:It could just travel through higher physical dimensions.
Speaker A:I mean, I feel like flies sort of do that because you swat where it is now. And by the time you've got your thing is hit it, it's somewhere else. It does feel a bit like they can see the future and be somewhere where your fly swatter isn't.
Speaker B:On mosquitoes in an enclosed area. And they found that out of 10,000 attempted swats, 800 landed. So 8% success swatting rate precisely because of their ability. Well, they have two strategies that they employ. One is the randomness. So you can't actually see where they're going to end up. And the second is their evasion. In fact, the seminal study, diurnal and nocturnal mosquitoes escape looming threats using distinct flight strategies. It's a fascinating read.
Speaker A:Yeah, but I mean, basically, they're Jedi.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker A:Don't they see time faster as well than we do? Certainly, I think I'm sure I've seen flies and pigeons do as well. Yeah, they're smaller. And their nerve signals are going to take much less time to activate their flight response than ours can. As much as I'm reluctant to, we need to kind of move on a little bit towards. Let's just talk about FBI psychological warfare. Let's. Because that's what this is. I mean, ultimately, this is the way you can use this is to irritate people with. This is how we can use this knowledge that we're unearthing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the two probably most famous times that this has been employed was, first of all, David. Actually, the first instance of the two that I looked at was General. Do you remember General Noriega, a Nicaraguan guy who was ousted, wasn't he? And then he fled to the Vatican embassy. I thought they would be playing. Now, they did play. Well, they didn't, apparently, from what I've got written here, play like annoying noises, which I would have thought you'd go for, like a really loud drill. Didn't they play music? Yeah, they played some apparently songs deliberately picked for comedy value. Like I Fought the Law by The Clash. Which is a good song. Yeah, Panama by Van Halen. All I Want is You by U2. And If I Had a Rocket Launcher by Bruce Coburn. But also, I wonder how good his English was. I don't know. I mean, the point is, though, rock music, I would happily sit down and listen to some of those hits. It's quite a good playlist. Exactly. Well, thanks very much. Like what? But I mean, it was very loud. And I think they played it all the time. And it worked. He surrendered after three days. So, you know, but the other time was David Koresh. Do you remember? He was the Waco guy. And while they were besieging, they played jet planes, Tibetan chanting, the sound of rabbits being killed, Gregorian chants, but then also Christmas carols. And apparently one of the things I've seen was These Boots Are Made for Walking by Nancy Sinatra, which is a great song. So I don't really know what the logic of that is.
Speaker B:And it didn't really work in that case, did it? Because... No, they had to storm it and everyone died.
Speaker C:I think no matter how good the song is after its 50th repeat. Yeah, that could be it. Here We Are, Merry Christmas. It's a great song. But when you're going around shopping at Christmastime, you hear it everywhere all the time and you start hating it. It's enough to make you set up a cult and murder all your followers.
Speaker A:Exactly. But I think if we want to really crank up the annoyingness, what you should do is play it for a certain amount of time between one and 20 seconds and then start it again. Yeah. Just randomly each time. The first five seconds, then the first three seconds, then the first 11 seconds.
Speaker C:Start it at a random point, stop it at a random point with a random gap and then just keep doing that.
Speaker A:That would definitely be more annoying. Yeah, you want to replicate that sort of mosquito flight movement, but in an oral sense. Look, we need to... I think we're ready for the moment, right? Which is, what is the most annoying insect? Yeah. According, I presume, that you're using your matrices or whatever they are, your systems. Should we do that? Are we ready? Yeah. Right. Who wants to kick off?
Speaker C:Well, I never actually got around to applying mine.
Speaker A:No, so let's... Oh, you mean you haven't done it yet? No, I haven't done it yet. OK, you do that and I'll tell you what mine is. It's the NTCP framework. OK. Yeah, I made it up just like Peter, but they've got more sensible names. So I've got noise, threat, control and prevalence, right? Noise is, as we discussed, does it fit into that annoying noise? Then we've got threat, which is, does it pose a threat? Now, this actually comprises two things, which is stinging and actual physical harm, but also hygiene, which I think is also... We didn't really discuss this, but one of the things that people find irritating is I would see as hygiene threats. So, for example, people picking their nose or clipping their toenails on public transport, for example. So there's a whole range of things that people claim to find annoying, which are really to do with sort of... Being disgusted by it. Yeah, disgust. So I've got the threat, then control is your ability to do something about it. And here, well, I'll tell you in a minute how I've applied it. But basically, if you can remove the threat with relatively little effort, then it's one. But it's three if you can't do anything about it at all. And then prevalence, simply how often it intrudes into my daily life. And although I'm not a big fan of these kind of systems, analysis frameworks, what I do like is what you've done here can be applied. I can see what you've done. It's not just for insects, it's for anything, right? Yeah, we could do it to a bear, for example. Yeah, yeah. Bear would be actually less irritating. It would score probably three or four in total. Whereas here... So out of the three contenders... What's more annoying, podcast hosts or insects? I've got an instinctive answer to that that's also correct. I have top three in order, right? But hold on, you need a name for your system. NTCP framework. That's not enough, but anyway. So bottom of the three is mosquitoes. Noise three, threat two. But here's the key thing, control one, right? You put the light on, you can always find the bastards and squish them. They are top of three out of three for noise. Threat, only two out of three because I don't find mosquito bites that annoying. And they have the decency to inject you with anesthetic. And prevalence, you don't really get them too much in the UK. Second, flies. I've identified a problem with your system, keep going. Second for flies, eight out of 12. Noise two, I find the noise of a fly more annoying than the noise of a mosquito. Threat one, don't really bother me. I'm not feeling threatened by a fly. Control two, because you can squat them, but it's not as easy as with a mosquito. Prevalence three, they're everywhere. There's not a weekend goes by without me being invaded by a fly. Top of the list, 11 out of 12 wasps. And noise three, I find them the most annoying noise. It's angry and aggrieved. They sound aggrieved, which they've no right to be, because they're the ones trying to steal my food, for example. Threat three, because they can actually harm me, as well as actually stealing my stuff, which is what makes me so angry with wasps. Control three, because you cannot swat a wasp. And the worst thing is if you do ever kill a wasp, you'll find that it's all its mates turn up. And finally, prevalence only two. This is where the wasp falls down. It depends on the summer. What does? Well, maybe.
Speaker B:I mean, some summers they're everywhere.
Speaker A:If you take prevalence out of there, that will give you a sort of proximate score. So if there was one in the room, what would be most annoying? Wasps would easily score top for me. But no, I can't say. See, I mean, if I'm encountering flies more often, then it's fair that I find them more annoying. But so, yeah, I'd say the wasp. That accords with my intuition. The wasp, to me, is the most evil and unpleasant of God's great creations. I like the way my prediction is coming true, by the way. And I think this also goes back to that podcast about adventure. I don't think you've been on enough adventures. I've been to mosquito ridden countries a lot. Really? Because one of the things about mosquitoes is. But the prevalence would go up, right? Yeah, at the time, yeah. But I'm just saying, which one would I rank high? It's like, what's more annoying, right? What's more annoying or more of a problem in my daily life? Meteor strikes or cars? Well, meteor strikes are worse. And if one was about to happen, I'd definitely rather contend with a car than a meteor strike.
Speaker B:You see, I think prevalence should be probably like a multiplying factor, because like loads of mosquitoes around is really annoying. It makes everything else more annoying.
Speaker A:So I think what we're talking about is not a mosquito, but this is mosquitoes en masse, is what I'm trying to talk about, is which species is the worst, not which particular individual insect is the worst, which is going to give you a different answer. All right, there we are. Okay, interesting. Who wants to go next?
Speaker C:Well, I've scored wasps, mosquitoes, ants and flies. Oh, ants. Yeah, okay, as a control, I guess. As a control, yeah, because they're pretty low annoyingness. Now, my framework doesn't quite... So then they come out... First, I won't go into the details, but I'll just pick out some highlights. But wasps and mosquitoes score equally, which feels about right. Then ants, then flies, least annoying. Now, I think my framework needs a bit of work.
Speaker A:I was going to say, if a humble ant can out annoyingness a fly, that's quite right.
Speaker C:The ant scores very highly on the tickliness scale. And also eating all your jam. Yeah, so it's the tickliness and the annoyingness of eating the jam. They're kind of like ruining the picnic, they're crawling all over food, which has a sort of fairly high, a relatively high impact.
Speaker A:I've had more picnics ruined by wasps than ants. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker C:I mean, well, wasps, you just kill it, it's done. No.
Speaker A:There's loads of them and they're difficult to kill. Yeah. And they might hurt you when you're trying to kill them, which the ants... Yeah, you can't. I've had... There's been one particular time when we were in a really nice little spot with a burger van and stuff up in Denmark. Beautiful, you know, lakeside place. We got like chicken nuggets and chips and was settling down and there's no one else around. We were like, why is nobody else around? And then it became obvious because the wasps then appeared and attacked and we just had to retreat to our car. Yeah. And eating in the car is so depressing. That happened to be in Wasps, I hate them. It was like a horror movie. Yeah.
Speaker C:An ant isn't going to beat you back to your car. No, but it will if it does the same thing the wasps did. If it crawls all over the picnic blanket, you're going to have to go, right? Same effect. So their score's roughly the same as a wasp. So flies score quite low because once it's gone, it's gone. There's no lingering effect. And also, apart from the noise, it doesn't really do much else to you. So it's got a very low kind of negative impact thing to you. So the score's quite low on that. Whereas wasps and mosquitoes both have pretty high, you know, relatively high lingeringness because it's painful and lasts for a while. And relatively high sort of tickliness, the impact scale and relatively high sort of unignorability. You know, you can't just ignore a wasp when it's around you. Absolutely not. Because it might get caught. Even though you're meant to. They're front and centre. Might get caught between your second chin and give you a sting.
Speaker A:Well, yeah, I mean, it's... Curiously, though, if a wasp landed on a chip and I shoot it away, I'd still eat the chip. But if a fly landed on a chip, I'd feel a bit funny about eating the chip.
Speaker B:Because wasps tend not to congregate on don't.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah. One thing we haven't quite talked about enough, especially in what you were talking about there, is we're sometimes talking about a wasp, an ant. But we've talked about it a bit. But the thing about insects, there's a lot of them. They swarm. So what came out top, did you say?
Speaker C:Wasps and mosquitoes, equally high.
Speaker B:OK, Chris? Yeah, so for me, one of the things... I've got very similar frameworks to these guys. But the main thing that differs, I think, is the perception of malevolence or malice. Or, you know, they're doing this deliberately, which wasps score very highly on. And I have this sense that wasps are probably more sentient than they actually are. But I kind of looked into a bit. And they're actually, to say their brains are the size of a grain of rice, similar to a honeybee. They apparently display lots more types of reasoning than bees do, because they exhibit more sophisticated sort of cultural behaviours. They have the opera in them. Yeah, that's right. Well, no, they apparently, because they live in hierarchical societies, in bee colonies, there's one queen bee. That's it. Everybody bows down to the queen bee. In wasps, they have to have a dominance hierarchy, a pecking order. And so they're capable of this thing called transitive inference, which is like if, you know, Fraser can beat up Peter, but Peter can beat up Nick, they then work out that Fraser can beat up Nick, you see. So they're able to solve it. So I ended up kind of actually slightly admiring the wasp, even though it's terrible. It's like an evil genius kind of thing. So I thought, well, I can't really find that annoying. And so I introduced a new insect, which was the earwig. Now, I didn't really know why an earwig was called an earwig until I spent a night in a tent trying to go to sleep. And every time I drifted off, there was an earwig in my ear waking me up again. And yeah, so that was really, really annoying. It led to a sleepless night. God, yeah, I didn't. I thought that was a myth. Yeah, well, I can confirm that it isn't. So the earwig. The earwig is your most annoying? If you're trying to go to sleep in a tent. Yeah. I bet the listeners didn't see that one coming. Didn't see that coming, no.
Speaker C:No, no. All right. It's quite situational then. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:But I like the newfound respect you have for your opponent, the wasp.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker A:OK, we need to finish.
Speaker C:We should also just say that we are referring to the yellow and black particular type of wasp. Yellow jackets. Yeah, yellow jackets. Vulgar, vulparis. Something like that, yeah. And there are lots of different types of wasps. You wouldn't even know were wasps. They just go about their business. Yeah, yeah. I think what makes a wasp a wasp is that they are predatory. They predate other insects.
Speaker A:I think that's one of the other reasons, I think, for their more sophisticated behavior and so on. I once tried to save a wasp. What do you think happened? You don't need to answer that. Probably stang you.
Speaker C:He wrote you a letter of thanks.
Speaker A:Well, I feel justified in what I said earlier on, apart from Chris's sort of outlier there. You think we're going to finish, right? We're not. Super quick question. You're only allowed a more or less one word answer. Best insect? Bee. Bee. Ant.
Speaker C:Ant. Bee. Bee, I'm with bees. I'm going to take it on bees. Frog, right? All right, brilliant.
Speaker A:We'll stop there. No, it's got to be either a butterfly or ladybird, probably, I think. All right, we'll stop there. Okay. So I think we've, you know, give that a good thrashing. Worst insect, most annoying insect. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Chris Wragg, Nick Hare, and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.
