108 | Carl Bergstrom on Information, Disinformation, and Bullshit
We are living, in case you haven't noticed, in a world full of bullshit. It's hard to say whether the amount is truly increasing, but it seems that everywhere you look someone is trying to convince yo...
3 Aug 20201h 24min
107 | Russ Shafer-Landau on the Reality of Morality
Despite occasional and important disagreements, most people are in rough agreement about what it means to be moral, to do the right thing. There's much less agreement about why we should be moral, or ...
27 Jul 20201h 30min
106 | Stuart Bartlett on What "Life" Means
Someday, most likely, we will encounter life that is not as we know it. We might find it elsewhere in the universe, we might find it right here on Earth, or we might make it ourselves in a lab. Will w...
20 Jul 20201h 25min
105 | Ann-Sophie Barwich on the Science and Philosophy of Smell
We gather empirical evidence about the nature of the world through our senses, and use that evidence to construct an image of the world in our minds. But not all senses are created equal; in practice,...
13 Jul 20201h 17min
104 | David Rosen and Scott Miles on the Neuroscience of Music and Creativity
Creativity is one of those things that we all admire but struggle to define or make concrete. Music provides a useful laboratory in which to examine what creativity is all about — how do people become...
6 Jul 20201h 26min
103 | J. Kenji López-Alt on Cooking As and With Science
Cooking is art, but it's also very much science — mostly chemistry, but with important contributions from physics and biology. (Almost like a well-balanced recipe…) And I can't think of anyone better ...
29 Jun 20201h 15min
102 | Maria Konnikova on Poker, Psychology, and Reason
The best chess and Go players in the world aren't human beings any more; they're artificially-intelligent computer programs. But the best poker players are still humans. Poker is a laboratory for unde...
22 Jun 20201h 20min
101 | David Baltimore on the Mysteries of Viruses
I recently saw an estimate that if you took all the novel coronaviruses in the world (the actual viruses, not patients), you could fit them into a bucket no more than a couple of liters in volume. A h...
15 Jun 20201h 14min
