Remembering Michael Brooks ... The existential stakes of enlightenment ... Overcoming the affective dimension of cognitive bias ... Bringing broader awareness to the concept of cognitive bias ... Cognitive bias and the roots of war ... The folly of feedback loops ... Quelling our primitive retributive impulses ... Taking a mulligan in your meditation practice ... Focusing on the hindrances ... Can you fail at meditation? ...

Meaningoflife.tv

Cognitive Bias and Conflict (Robert Wright & Josh Summers)

A plea to the weary to return to the Woke Wars ... Who is James Lindsay? ... Lindsay's book, Cynical Theories ... Lindsay's other critiques of wokeness ... The religion of wokeness, the religion of anti-wokeness ... Lindsay jumps on the Trump train (starts shoveling coal) ... The anti-semitism thing ... David: In a way, Lindsay is on the side of BLM ...

Saving Anti-Wokeness from Itself (David Ottlinger & Cathy Young)

Oliver's new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals ... Oliver outlines “compatibilism,” the idea that free will and determinism can coexist ... Bob: Everyone should be a free will agnostic ... The occasionally dramatic consequences of arguments against free will ... Would determinism require us to reform our approach to criminal justice? ... A (possible) quantum hack for free will vs. determinism ... Bob thinks compatibilism is bullshit ... ... ... but Oliver tries to persuade him there's something to it ... Oliver: No position on free will and determinism is free of contradiction ...

Contesting Determinism (Robert Wright & Oliver Burkeman)

John's recent bout of fever-induced hallucinations ... Does math actually help you understand QM? ... What experiments in QM have and have not verified ... John: All interpretations of QM are bad ... What do we want from science? ... "An operating system for reality" ...

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics (Robert Wright & John Horgan)

Disavowing the naturalistic fallacy ... Why “sex” may not mean what you think it means ... Did evolution make women “choosier” about sex partners than men? ... Haggling over the price of sperm and eggs ... Agustín: Empirical studies complicate evolutionary psychology’s theoretical models ... The evolutionary significance of non-reproductive sex ... Why are males bigger than females in our species? ... Looking at pornography (for insights into human evolution) ... Are male and female sexual jealousy systematically different? ...

Debating the Sexual Psychology of Men and Women (Robert Wright & Agustín Fuentes)

Sabine inspires John's quantum experiment ... Sabine previews her book-in-progress ... Isn't quantum mechanics non-deterministic? ... Is consciousness conserved? ... John and Sabine tangle over free will ... Physics creationism ... Will quantum mechanics be replaced? ...

Consolations of Physics (John Horgan & Sabine Hossenfelder)

Oliver’s new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals ... Why is it so hard to accept the limits of our productivity? ... Prioritizing mindfully ... Heideggerian time management ... Finding value in even "meaningless" work ... Reducing the lure of distractions ... Ten tools for embracing your finitude ... Five (pretty intense) questions for reflection ...

Time Management for Mortals (Robert Wright & Oliver Burkeman)

Josh's aversion to the term "guru" ... Explaining the explain/excuse conflation ... The (possible) evolutionary origins of (biased) arguing ... Are humans mismatched to their modern environment? ... Building strengths vs. addressing deficiencies ... Defusing attribution error ... Making cognitive empathy cool ... Using meditation to strengthen cognitive empathy ... The mythical side of Bob ... Rationalists, effective altruists, and other possible fellow travelers ...

The Dharma of Bob 6: The Explain/Excuse Conflation (Robert Wright & Josh Summers)

Agustín on what he was and wasn’t saying in his controversial Science piece on Darwin ... What is biological anthropology? ... What social media critiques of Agustín’s editorial missed ... Untangling Darwin’s attitudes toward race and genocide ... Darwin’s worries about his theory’s acceptance ... What do female gibbons want? ... Agustín: Commonly used racial categories are unscientific ... The changing rules for competition among males ... Okay, so should we cancel Darwin or not? ...

Should Darwin Be Cancelled? (Robert Wright & Agustín Fuentes)

Will science ever absorb the arts and humanities? ... Why Phil wrote a book about quantum mechanics ... Knowing quantum math doesn’t necessarily help ... Is "information” the key to quantum mechanics? ... What quantum computing can and can’t do ... The weirdness and arbitrariness of existence ...

Quantum Mechanics and the Quest for Final Knowledge (John Horgan & Philip Ball)

Thinking in Tongues (Nikita Petrov & David Poleski)

Defining effective altruism ... Rob explains the meaning of ‘80,000 Hours’ ... Should young people dedicate their careers to fighting climate change? ... The Apocalypse Aversion Project ... How cognitive biases fuel tribalism ... Bob: We need a psychological revolution ... Are external threats the best way to bring people together? ... The balance between surveillance and public safety ... Bob: Let's retire the word 'apologist' ... Making rationality cool ... Rob challenges Bob to find flaws in "The Moral Animal" ...

Saving the World One Podcast at a Time (Robert Wright & Rob Wiblin)

Josh tries to help Bob retool his meditation practice ... Identifying the purpose of your practice ... What to do when your mind wanders ... Tuning your mind ... The Four Rs ... Can mindfulness help us bolster our courage? ... Learning to tolerate blowback from your tribe ... Suffering and the psychology of tribalism ... Developing a non-zero-sum relationship with your own mind ... So you say you've been called a neofascist... ...

The Dharma of Bob 5: Mindful Defiance (Robert Wright & Josh Summers)

The value of defying your tribe ... Egocentric bias and attribution error ... The thin line between between courage and acting like an asshole ... Why do we punish people for unintentional transgressions? ... To understand all is to forgive all … ... … but forgiveness won’t get you retweets ... Are people’s politics as irrational as they seem? ... William James’ preternatural insight into human psychology ... Should the Philip Roth biography have been pulled? ... Reliving the worst day of your life ...

Despite Our Best Intentions (Robert Wright & Paul Bloom)

John’s new book, Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity ... John’s early religious sensibility ... The Advaita Vedanta tradition in Hinduism ... Grappling with the human predicament ... Approaches to ultimate reality ... John’s brush with non-dualistic experience ... Why John doesn’t consider himself a perennialist ... Touching the infinite elephant ...

Circling the Elephant (Robert Wright & John Thatamanil)

Conversations about philosophy, science, religion and spirituality

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