Rationally Speaking #199 - Jessica Flanigan on "Why people should have the right to self-medicate"
This episode features Jessica Flanigan, professor of normative and applied ethics, making the case that patients should have the right to take pharmaceutical drugs without needing to get a prescriptio...
8 Jan 201842min
Rationally Speaking #198 - Timur Kuran on "Private Truths and Public Lies"
In this episode, economist Timur Kuran explains the ubiquitous phenomenon of "preference falsification" -- in which people claim to support something publicly even though they don't support it private...
11 Des 201759min
Rationally Speaking #197 - Doug Hubbard on "Why people think some things can't be quantified (and why they're wrong)"
In this episode Julia talks with Doug Hubbard, author of How to Measure Anything, about why people so often believe things are impossible to quantify like "innovation" or "quality of life." For exampl...
13 Nov 201753min
Rationally Speaking #196 - Eric Schwitzgebel on "Weird ideas and opaque minds"
Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel returns to the show to explore several related questions: His taxonomy of the three different styles of thinker -- "Truth," "Dare," and "Wonder" -- and whether one of the...
30 Okt 20171h 5min
Rationally Speaking #195 - Zach Weinersmith on "Emerging technologies that'll improve and/or ruin everything"
This episode features Zach Weinersmith, creator of the philosophical webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and the co-author (with his wife Kelly Weinersmith) of the new book Soonish: 10 Emergin...
15 Okt 201750min
Rationally Speaking #194 - Robert Wright on "Why Buddhism is True"
This episode features bestselling author Robert Wright making the case for why Buddhism was right about human nature: its diagnosis that our suffering is mainly due to a failure to see reality clearly...
2 Okt 201750min
Rationally Speaking #193 - Eric Jonas on "Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?"
The field of neuroscience has been collecting more and more data, and developing increasingly advanced technological tools in its race to understand how the brain works. But can those data and tools e...
18 Sep 20171h 4min
Rationally Speaking #192 - Jesse Singal on "The problems with implicit bias tests"
You may have heard of the Implicit Associations Test (IAT) -- one of the most famous instruments from social psychology, it's frequently cited as evidence that most people harbor implicit racism or se...
3 Sep 201751min
