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 of knowledge, half of what is true today will over...
10 Apr 201730min
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 now live, a multimedia psychedelic freakout in which ...
27 Mar 201739min
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 other quirks of human reasoning and perception were ...
11 Mar 20171h 1min
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 chaos that seems organized in hindsight? In this episo...
25 Feb 20171h 5min
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 truth ever win? Do people ever come around, or are we ...
11 Feb 20171h 3min
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 do that, when that person expends effortful thinki...
29 Jan 201747min
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 temporary weakening of your convictions, some soft...
13 Jan 201740min
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 episodes we learn all about the strange phenomenon of ...
15 Des 201647min
