150 | Simon DeDeo on How Explanations Work and Why They Sometimes Fail

150 | Simon DeDeo on How Explanations Work and Why They Sometimes Fail

You observe a phenomenon, and come up with an explanation for it. That's true for scientists, but also for literally every person. (Why won't my car start? I bet it's out of gas.) But there are literally an infinite number of possible explanations for every phenomenon we observe. How do we invent ones we think are promising, and then decide between them once invented? Simon DeDeo (in collaboration with Zachary Wojtowicz) has proposed a way to connect explanatory values ("simplicity," "fitting the data," etc) to specific mathematical expressions in Bayesian reasoning. We talk about what makes explanations good, and how they can get out of control, leading to conspiracy theories or general crackpottery, from QAnon to flat earthers.

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Simon DeDeo received his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.


Jaksot(416)

54 | Indre Viskontas on Music and the Brain

54 | Indre Viskontas on Music and the Brain

It doesn't mean much to say music affects your brain — everything that happens to you affects your brain. But music affects your brain in certain specific ways, from changing our mood to helping us le...

8 Heinä 20191h 15min

53 | Solo -- On Morality and Rationality

53 | Solo -- On Morality and Rationality

What does it mean to be a good person? To act ethically and morally in the world? In the old days we might appeal to the instructions we get from God, but a modern naturalist has to look elsewhere. To...

1 Heinä 20192h 5min

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Games play an important, and arguably increasing, role in human life. We play games on our computers and our phones, watch other people compete in games, and occasionally break out the cards or the Mo...

24 Kesä 20191h 4min

51 | Anthony Aguirre on Cosmology, Zen, Entropy, and Information

51 | Anthony Aguirre on Cosmology, Zen, Entropy, and Information

Cosmologists have a standard set of puzzles they think about: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, whether there was a period of inflation, the evolution of structure, and so on. But there are a...

17 Kesä 20191h 31min

50 | Patricia Churchland on Conscience, Morality, and the Brain

50 | Patricia Churchland on Conscience, Morality, and the Brain

It's fun to spend time thinking about how other people should behave, but fortunately we also have an inner voice that keeps offering opinions about how we should behave ourselves: our conscience. Whe...

10 Kesä 20191h 12min

49 | Nicholas Christakis on Humanity, Biology, and What Makes Us Good

49 | Nicholas Christakis on Humanity, Biology, and What Makes Us Good

It's easy to be cynical about humanity's present state and future prospects. But we have made it this far, and in some ways we're doing better than we used to be. Today's guest, Nicholas Christakis, i...

3 Kesä 20191h 54min

48 | Marq de Villiers on Hell and Damnation

48 | Marq de Villiers on Hell and Damnation

If you're bad, we are taught, you go to Hell. Who in the world came up with that idea? Some will answer God, but for the purpose of today's podcast discussion we'll put that possibility aside and look...

27 Touko 20191h 11min

47 | Adam Rutherford on Humans, Animals, and Life in General

47 | Adam Rutherford on Humans, Animals, and Life in General

Most people in the modern world — and the vast majority of Mindscape listeners, I would imagine — agree that humans are part of the animal kingdom, and that all living animals evolved from a common an...

20 Touko 20191h 38min

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