Rationally Speaking #169 - Owen Cotton-Barratt on "Thinking About Humanity's Far Future"
What can we do now to affect whether humanity is still around in 1000 years (and what life will be like then)? In this episode, Julia talks...
Radio and PodcastLive Radio & Podcasts
Science & Medicine
Sped up Rationally Speaking
Sped up Rationally Speaking
Episodes
20 of 166 episodes
Rationally Speaking #168 - Don Moore on "Overconfidence"
This episode features a chat with Don Moore, professor of management of organizations at the University of California Berkeley's Haas School...
Rationally Speaking #167 - Samuel Arbesman on "Why technology is becoming too complex"
As the technology we rely on every day becomes increasingly sophisticated, it's getting to the point where it's too complicated to understan...
Rationally Speaking #166 - Eric Schwitzgebel on "Why you should expect the truth to be crazy"
Some theories violate common sense so wildly that you want to just reject them out of hand. For example, "The United States is conscious," o...
Rationally Speaking #165 - Robert Frank on "Success and Luck"
If someone asks you, "What caused your success (in finance, your career, etc.)?" what probably comes to mind for you is a story about how yo...
Rationally Speaking #164 - James Evans on "Using meta-knowledge to learn how science works"
Has science gotten slower over the years? Does the proliferation of jargon make it harder for scientists to collaborate? What unstated assum...
Rationally Speaking #163 - Gregg Caruso on "Free Will and Moral Responsibility"
If people don't have free will, then can we be held morally responsible for our actions? And what would happen to society if we were to coll...
Rationally Speaking #162 - Sean Carroll on "Poetic Naturalism"
Naturalism is the stance that everything that exists in the universe arises from "natural" causes, of the sort observable by science -- not...
Rationally Speaking #161 - Tom Griffiths and Brian Christian on "Algorithms to Live By"
Julia chats with the authors of Algorithms to Live By, about how to apply key algorithms from computer science to our real life problems. Fo...
Rationally Speaking #160 - Live at NECSS -- Jacob Appel on "Tackling bioethical dilemmas"
It's the annual live Rationally Speaking episode, taped at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism in NYC! This year features ret...
Rationally Speaking #159 - Colin Allen on "Do fish feel pain?"
In this episode Julia talks with philosopher of cognitive science Colin Allen about whether fish can feel pain. In the process they explore...
Rationally Speaking #158 - Dr. George Ainslie on "Negotiating with your future selves"
Ever make a plan to diet, or exercise, or study, and then -- when the scheduled hour rolls around -- decide, "Nah, I'll just put it off anot...
Rationally Speaking #157 - Dr. Herculano-Houzel on "What made the human brain special?"
For centuries, scientists have wondered what makes humans so much smarter than other species. Some proposed it was the size of our brain (th...
Rationally Speaking #156 - David McRaney on "Why it’s so hard to change someone’s mind"
You're probably already aware that it's hard to change someone's mind with logical arguments and evidence, especially about emotionally char...
Rationally Speaking #155 - Uri Simonsohn on "Detecting fraud in social science"
He's been called a "Data vigilante." In this episode, Prof. Uri Simonsohn describes how he detects fraudulent work in psychology and economi...
Rationally Speaking #154 - Tom Griffiths on "Why your brain might be rational after all"
You've probably heard about cognitive biases -- the systematic errors human brains make when we try to reason or make decisions. But what if...
Rationally Speaking #153 - Dr. Vinay Prasad on "Why so much of what we 'know' about medicine is wrong"
We like to think of doctors as experts, whose recommendations are backed up by solid evidence. So why does it keep happening that a widely u...
Rationally Speaking #152 - Dan Fincke on "The pros and cons of civil disagreement"
Julia invites philosopher and blogger Dan Fincke onto the show, inspired by a productive disagreement they had on Facebook. Their topic in t...
Rationally Speaking #151 - Maria Konnikova on "Why everyone falls for con artists"
You've probably heard about victims of con artists -- like the people who hand over their life savings to sketchy gurus or psychics, or the...
Rationally Speaking #150 - Elizabeth Loftus on "The malleability of human memory"
Do you remember when you were a kid, and you had that great day at Disneyland where you got to meet Bugs Bunny? No? Think harder. It was a s...