34 | Paul Bloom on Empathy, Rationality, Morality, and Cruelty

34 | Paul Bloom on Empathy, Rationality, Morality, and Cruelty

Within every person's mind there is on ongoing battle between reason and emotion. It's not always a battle, of course; very often the two can work together. But at other times, our emotions push us toward actions that our reason would counsel against. Paul Bloom is a well-known psychologist and author who wrote the provocatively-titled book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, and is currently writing a book about the nature of cruelty. While I sympathize with parts of his anti-empathy stance, I try to stick up for the importance of empathy in the right circumstances. We have a great discussion about the relationship between reason and emotion. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Paul Bloom received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from MIT. He is currently the Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University. His research ranges over a variety of topics in moral psychology and childhood development. He is the author of several books and the recipient of numerous prizes, including the $1 million Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize in 2017. Web site Yale web page Wikipedia page TED talk on The Origins of Pleasure Amazon page Publications Online courses at Coursera Twitter

Episoder(418)

AMA | November 2025

AMA | November 2025

Welcome to the November 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

17 Nov 20253h 34min

335 | Andrew Jaffe on Models, Probability, and the Universe

335 | Andrew Jaffe on Models, Probability, and the Universe

Science has an incredibly impressive track record of uncovering nonintuitive ideas about the universe that turn out to be surprisingly accurate. It can be tempting to think of scientific discoveries a...

10 Nov 20251h 17min

334 | Daniel Whiteson on the Physics of and by Aliens

334 | Daniel Whiteson on the Physics of and by Aliens

The universe as revealed by physics is objective: it's out there, existing and behaving in ways that are completely independent of human thought. But the process by which we learn about the universe, ...

3 Nov 20251h 14min

333 | Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them

333 | Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them

Why are people wrong all the time, anyway? Is it because we human beings are too good at being irrational, using our biases and motivated reasoning to convince ourselves of something that isn't quite ...

27 Okt 20251h 10min

332 | Dmitri Tymoczko on the Mathematics Behind Music

332 | Dmitri Tymoczko on the Mathematics Behind Music

Music is math that you can dance to. The fact that certain notes sound good when played together, or in succession, is related to the mathematical properties of the frequencies to which they correspon...

20 Okt 20251h 21min

AMA | October 2025

AMA | October 2025

Welcome to the October 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pat...

13 Okt 20253h 37min

331 | Solo: Fine-Tuning, God, and the Multiverse

331 | Solo: Fine-Tuning, God, and the Multiverse

Certain features of our universe seem unnatural to us. These include "constants of nature" such as the cosmological constant and the mass of the Higgs boson, as well as features of the initial conditi...

6 Okt 20251h 54min

330 | Petter Törnberg on the Dynamics of (Mis)Information

330 | Petter Törnberg on the Dynamics of (Mis)Information

A characteristic of complex systems is that individual components combine to exhibit large-scale emergent behavior even when the components were not specifically designed for any particular purpose wi...

29 Sep 20251h 12min

Populært innen Vitenskap

fastlegen
rekommandert
tingenes-tilstand
forskningno
rss-rekommandert
rss-nysgjerrige-norge
sinnsyn
liberal-halvtime
smart-forklart
villmarksliv
vett-og-vitenskap-med-gaute-einevoll
fjellsportpodden
jss
pod-britannia
psykopoden
tomprat-med-gunnar-tjomlid
dekodet-2
aldring-og-helse-podden
nevropodden
rss-paradigmepodden