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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.

The facts don’t speak for themselves. Someone always speaks for them. From the opioid crisis to vaccines, vitamin and health supplements to climate change — even the widespread use of l…
youarenotsosmart.com

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 his book on the history of human progress, Our Kind, anthropologist Marvin Harris asked in the final chapter, “Will nature’s experiment with mind and culture end in nuclear war?&#822…
boingboing.net
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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.

When you think about your future health, career, finances, and even longevity — you imagine a rosy, hopeful future. For everyone else, though, you tend to be far more realistic. In other word…
youarenotsosmart.com

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

If you like David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart podcast, which explores human psychology in all its quirkiness, I think you’ll enjoy his book, You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Ma…
boingboing.net

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.

Parker Wiseman ran for student office in high school with photocopied flyers. He debated the public school system in social studies class. In college he took the courses and shook the hands that wo…
youarenotsosmart.com

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.

Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek evidence that supports our beliefs and that confirms our assumptions — when we could just as well seek disconfirmation of those beliefs and assumptio…
youarenotsosmart.com

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.

Psychology is working on the hardest problems in all of science. Physics, astronomy, geology — those are easy, by comparison. Understanding consciousness, willpower, ideology, social change &…
youarenotsosmart.com

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.

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 i…
youarenotsosmart.com

Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen. In particular, The Oatmeal. Unbelievable!

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Like peanut butter and chocolate, YANSS and The Oatmeal recently came together to make this:

This is a comic about the backfire effect.
theoatmeal.com

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.

Little did the champions of the Enlightenment know that once we had access to all the facts, reason and rationality wouldn’t just immediately wash across the land in a giant wave of enlightenment thinking.
youarenotsosmart.com

For centuries, before psychology and neuroscience, scammers, con artists, and magicians were the world’s leading experts on human cognition, reasoning, and perception.

On this episode, magician and scam expert Brian Brushwood explains why people fall for scams of all sizes, how to avoid them, and why most magicians can spot a fraudster a mile away.
youarenotsosmart.com

Is progress inevitable? Is it natural? Are we headed somewhere definite, or is change just chaos that seems organized in hindsight? In this episode we explore these questions with historian Ada Palmer.

Do we have the power to change the outcome of history?
youarenotsosmart.com

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.

When confronted with challenges to their erroneous beliefs, do the people who resist efforts at correction ever come around, or are we just causing more harm…
youarenotsosmart.com

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.

If you try to correct someone who you know is wrong, you run the risk of alarming their brains to a sort-of existential, epistemic threat, and if you do that, when that person expends effortful thinking to escape, that effort can strengthen their bel
youarenotsosmart.com

"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

How strong is your bullshit detector? And what exactly IS the scientific definition of bullshit? In this rebroadcast, we explore both of those concepts as well as what makes a person susceptible to…
youarenotsosmart.com