Rationally Speaking #34 - Celebrities and the Damage They Can Do

Rationally Speaking #34 - Celebrities and the Damage They Can Do

<p>If the recent hoopla about the royal wedding wasn’t enough to remind you, we live in a culture of celebrity, one where famous people command our attention and often pontificate on things they know nothing about. Obvious examples include the nonsense spewed out by Prince Charles about alternative medicine, and the former model Jenny McCarthy and her dangerous notion that vaccines are harmful because they cause autism. But these, of course, are easy targets. What are we to make of Ray Kurzweil (he of Singularity fame), who recently co-authored a book with a homeopath? Or of otherwise savvy political commentator Bill Maher, who doesn’t trust vaccines or anything coming from “Western” medicine? And then there are highly respectable intellectuals, like Stephen Hawking, who write off entire fields of inquiry (philosophy, in his case), without apparently knowing much about them.</p> <p>So what is going on here? Why do so many people listen to Jenny McCarthy? And why do so many bright minds go public with ridiculous notions? Is there a pattern? Can we do something to defend ourselves and the public from the celebrity attack on reason?</p>

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Rationally Speaking #169 - Owen Cotton-Barratt on "Thinking About Humanity's Far Future"

Rationally Speaking #169 - Owen Cotton-Barratt on "Thinking About Humanity's Far Future"

What can we do now to affect whether humanity is still around in 1000 years (and what life will be like then)? In this episode, Julia talks with Owen Cotton-Barratt, a mathematician at Oxford's Future...

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Rationally Speaking #168 - Don Moore on "Overconfidence"

Rationally Speaking #168 - Don Moore on "Overconfidence"

This episode features a chat with Don Moore, professor of management of organizations at the University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business, and an expert in overconfidence. Don and Julia...

3 Tammi 202143min

Rationally Speaking #167 - Samuel Arbesman on "Why technology is becoming too complex"

Rationally Speaking #167 - Samuel Arbesman on "Why technology is becoming too complex"

As the technology we rely on every day becomes increasingly sophisticated, it's getting to the point where it's too complicated to understand -- not just for individual users, but for any human at all...

3 Tammi 202148min

Rationally Speaking #166 - Eric Schwitzgebel on "Why you should expect the truth to be crazy"

Rationally Speaking #166 - Eric Schwitzgebel on "Why you should expect the truth to be crazy"

Some theories violate common sense so wildly that you want to just reject them out of hand. For example, "The United States is conscious," or "The most moral act would be to replace all living beings ...

3 Tammi 202152min

Rationally Speaking #165 - Robert Frank on "Success and Luck"

Rationally Speaking #165 - Robert Frank on "Success and Luck"

If someone asks you, "What caused your success (in finance, your career, etc.)?" what probably comes to mind for you is a story about how you worked hard and made smart choices. Which is likely true -...

3 Tammi 202151min

Rationally Speaking #164 - James Evans on "Using meta-knowledge to learn how science works"

Rationally Speaking #164 - James Evans on "Using meta-knowledge to learn how science works"

Has science gotten slower over the years? Does the proliferation of jargon make it harder for scientists to collaborate? What unstated assumptions -- "ghost theories" -- are shaping our research witho...

3 Tammi 202145min

Rationally Speaking #163 - Gregg Caruso on "Free Will and Moral Responsibility"

Rationally Speaking #163 - Gregg Caruso on "Free Will and Moral Responsibility"

If people don't have free will, then can we be held morally responsible for our actions? And what would happen to society if we were to collectively shed our belief in free will? In this episode Julia...

3 Tammi 202157min

Rationally Speaking #162 - Sean Carroll on "Poetic Naturalism"

Rationally Speaking #162 - Sean Carroll on "Poetic Naturalism"

Naturalism is the stance that everything that exists in the universe arises from "natural" causes, of the sort observable by science -- not supernatural ones. It's practically a foundational tenet of ...

3 Tammi 202148min

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