119 | Musa al-Gharbi on the Value of Intellectual Diversity

119 | Musa al-Gharbi on the Value of Intellectual Diversity

In the service of seeking truth, there would seem to be value in intellectual diversity, both in keeping ourselves honest and in the possibility of new ideas coming from unexpected quarters. That's true in the natural sciences, but even more so in the humanities and social sciences, where the right/wrong distinction is sometimes less clear. But academia isn't always diverse; as an empirical fact, there are a lot more liberals on university faculties than there are conservatives. I talk with Musa al-Gharbi about why this is true — self-selection? discrimination? — the extent to which it's a real problem, and how we should better think about the value of diverse viewpoints.

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Musa al-Gharbi received Masters degrees in philosophy from the University of Arizona and in sociology from Columbia University. He is currently a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology at Columbia, and until recently served as the Communications Director for Heterodox Academy. His essays have appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Atlantic Magazine, Foreign Affairs, Voice of America, and Al-Jazeera.


Episoder(415)

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22 | Joe Walston on Conservation, Urbanization, and the Way We Live on Earth

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21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind

21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind

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18 | Clifford Johnson on What's So Great About Superstring Theory

18 | Clifford Johnson on What's So Great About Superstring Theory

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15 Okt 20181h 12min

17 | Annalee Newitz on Science, Fiction, Economics, and Neurosis

17 | Annalee Newitz on Science, Fiction, Economics, and Neurosis

The job of science fiction isn't to predict the future; it's to tell interesting stories in an imaginative setting, exploring the implications of different ways the world could be different from our a...

8 Okt 20181h 11min

16 | Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future

16 | Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future

Aging -- everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundwo...

1 Okt 20181h 4min

15 | David Poeppel on Thought, Language, and How to Understand the Brain

15 | David Poeppel on Thought, Language, and How to Understand the Brain

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