The facts don’t speak for themselves. Someone always speaks for them. In this episode, we explore what happens when celebrity scientists and charismatic doctors escape the corrective mechanisms of science and use their fame to unleash horrors into the world.
In this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast, historian Ada Palmer teaches us about progress -- how we invented it as an idea, began pursuing it as a culture, and continue to redefine what it means, especially when we fail to achieve it.
In this episode, psychologist Tali Sharot explains why it is essential to our survival that we remain incredibly unrealistic and tend to overestimate the positive outcomes of our decisions and behaviors.
If you missed yesterday's deal, You Are Not So Smart is available today for $1.99 on Kindle at this link (deal expires soon) - check it: https://ebookdaily.com/bargain-kindle…/2017-08-08/B0052RE5MU
You Are Not So Smart shared a link.
In this episode, we visit Starkville, Mississippi, to explore what happens when an issue no one is willing to discuss openly suddenly becomes a topic of public debate.
You believe your favorite restaurant won’t give you food poisoning, and you wish that to be true -- your beliefs usually match your desires. But sometimes they don't. In this episode we explore what happens when your future desires and existing beliefs are incongruent.
Science is a perpetually self-correcting system, and that's why psychologist Brian Nosek says, "Science is wrong about everything, but you can trust it more than anything.” Some of the most headline-producing research in the last 20 years isn't standing up to attempts to reproduce its findings, and Nosek want to help figure out why -- and fix it.
In medical school, they tell you half of what you are about to learn won’t be true when you graduate — they just don’t know which half.
In every field of knowledge, half of what is true today will one day be updated with better information, and it turns out that we actually know when that day will come for many academic pursuits.
In this episode, we sit down with author Sam Arbesman and discuss this and more from his book, The Half Life of Facts.
Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen. In particular, The Oatmeal. Unbelievable!
Like peanut butter and chocolate, YANSS and The Oatmeal recently came together to make this:
In this episode, we explore active information avoidance -- the act of keeping our senses away from information that might be useful, that we know is out there, that would cost us nothing to obtain, but that we’d still rather not learn.
For centuries, before psychology and neuroscience, scammers, con artists, and magicians were the world’s leading experts on human cognition, reasoning, and perception.
Do the people who resist correction ever come around? In this episode we learn about the backfire effect's natural breaking point, and why it is so hard to reach it.
In this episode you'll hear from three experts who explain how attempting to correct misinformation can sometimes end up causing more harm than good.
"In order for someone to lie, they have to think they know what the truth is. For a bullshitter, it’s irrelevant." - Psychologist Gordon Pennycook
