Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchChoosing to Believe
Episode 164
David and Tamler argue about William James' classic essay "The Will to Believe." What's more important - avoiding falsehood or discovering truth? Whe…
7 years, 4 months ago
Should I Stay or Should I Go? (Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas")
Episode 163
David and Tamler are pulled into Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." Omelas is a truly happy city, except for one child who liv…
7 years, 4 months ago
Parents Just Don't Understand (with Paul Bloom)
Episode 162
As parents we like to think we have an impact on our children - their future, their happiness, the kinds of people they turn out to be. But
are we de…
7 years, 5 months ago
Reach-Around Knowledge and Bottom Performers (The Dunning-Kruger Effect)
Episode 161
The less we know, the more we know it. David and Tamler talk about the notorious Dunning-Kruger effect, which makes us overconfident in beliefs on to…
7 years, 5 months ago
Everything is Meaningless: The Book of Ecclesiastes
Episode 160
David and Tamler dive into the book of Ecclesiastes, an absurdist classic that is somehow also a book of the Bible. Is everything meaningless, vain, …
7 years, 6 months ago
You Have the Right to Go to Prison
Episode 159
Poor and black defendants have more legal rights than ever, but that didn't stop mass incarceration. Why is that? We talk about a paper by Paul Butle…
7 years, 6 months ago
False Dichotomies and Oral Reciprocity
Episode 158
David and Tamler talk about the invasion of dual process theories in psychology. Why do we love theories that divide complex phenomena into just two …
7 years, 7 months ago
Notes From Underground (Pt. 2)
Episode 157
David and Tamler continue their discussion of Dostoevsky's funny, sad, philosophical novella Notes From Underground. We focus on part 2 this time - t…
7 years, 7 months ago
Notes From Underground (Pt. 1)
Episode 156
We're sick men. We're spiteful men. We're unpleasant men. We think our livers are diseased (especially Tamler's). So we talk about Dostoevsky's wild,…
7 years, 8 months ago
Alfred Hitchcock's Money Shot
Episode 155
David and Tamler dive deep into Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 hallucinatory classic, Vertigo. Why does this movie seem to gain stature among critics and ac…
7 years, 8 months ago