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099 - The Half Life of Facts
In medical school they tell you half of what you are about to learn won't be true when you graduate - they just don't know which half. In every field…
9 years, 1 month ago
098 - Active Information Avoidance
The cyberpunks, the Founding Fathers, 19th Century philosophers, and the Enlightenment thinkers - they all looked forward to the world in which we no…
9 years, 1 month ago
097 - Scams (rebroadcast)
Before we had names for them or a science to study them, the people who could claim the most expertise on biases, fallacies, heuristics and all the o…
9 years, 2 months ago
096 - Progress
Do we have the power to change the outcome of history? Is progress inevitable? Is it natural? Are we headed somewhere definite, or is change just cha…
9 years, 2 months ago
095 - The Backfire Effect - Part Three
If dumping evidence into people’s laps often just makes their beliefs stronger, would we just be better off trying some other tactic, or does the tru…
9 years, 3 months ago
094 - The Backfire Effect - Part Two
If you try to correct someone who you know is wrong, you run the risk of alarming their brains to a sort-of existential, epistemic threat, and if you…
9 years, 3 months ago
093 - The Backfire Effect - Part One
We don’t treat all of our beliefs the same.
The research shows that when a strong-yet-erroneous, belief is challenged, yes, you might experience some…
9 years, 3 months ago
091 - Learned Helplessness (rebroadcast)
Even when the prison doors are left wide open, we sometimes refuse to attempt escape. Why is that?
In this rebroadcast of one of our most popular epi…
9 years, 4 months ago
090 - Reality - Donald Hoffman
Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? For our guest in this episode, cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman, that's his day job.
Hoffman…
9 years, 5 months ago
089 - Connections - James Burke
Legendary science historian James Burke returns to explain his newest project, a Connections app that will allow anyone to "think connectively" about…
9 years, 5 months ago