Episodes

  • #87 - Gullibility, Belief, and Conformity (with Hugo Mercier)

    #87 - Gullibility, Belief, and Conformity (with Hugo Mercier)
    Jun 20 2025
    Ben and Vaden test their French skills and have Hugo Mercier on the podcast to discuss who we trust and what we believe. Are humans gullible? Do we fall for propaganda and advertising campaigns? Do we follow expert consensus or forge ahead as independent thinkers? Can Vaden go for one episode without bringing up Trump? Hugo Mercier (https://sites.google.com/site/hugomercier/) is a research director at the CNRS (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris), where he work with the Evolution and Social Cognition team. Check out his two books: The Enigma of Reason (https://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Reason-Hugo-Mercier/dp/0674368304) and Not Born Yesterday (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691208921) . We discuss Mercier's thoughts on the cognitive bias literature Open vigilance mechanisms Criticism of the System 1 vs System 2 dichotomy Why Kahneman misinterpreted the bat and the ball thought experiment Do flat earthers really believe the earth is flat? The Asch conformity experiment Preference falsification vs internalization of professed beliefs How important is social signaling? Trump, MAGA, gullibility, and Tariffs How effective are advertisements? How effective is propaganda? Is social science reforming? References The Enigma of Reason (https://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Reason-Hugo-Mercier/dp/0674368304) by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber Not Born Yesterday (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691208921) Our previous episodes on the Not Born Yesterday (https://www.incrementspodcast.com/84) and The Enigma of Reason (https://www.incrementspodcast.com/39) Socials Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link Become a patreon subscriber here (https://www.patreon.com/Increments). Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here (https://ko-fi.com/increments). Click dem like buttons on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ) How much system 2 thinking does it take to misunderstand system 1 vs system 2? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com Special Guest: Hugo Mercier.
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    54 mins
  • #0 - Introduction

    #0 - Introduction
    May 19 2020

    Ben and Vaden attempt to justify why the world needs another podcast, and fail.

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    8 mins
  • #86 (Reaction) - On Confidence and Evidence: Reacting to Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian (Part 2)

    #86 (Reaction) - On Confidence and Evidence: Reacting to Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian (Part 2)
    May 31 2025
    Go fund me page for Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar Please donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-dr-alaa-alnajjar-and-her-family-in-gaza Podcast w/ Dr. Ali Al Najjar https://open.spotify.com/episode/2f6twY40sjd0zwT0Eks3NX Further Reading https://www.thesun.ie/news/15281868/sligo-doctor-ali-al-najjar-nieces-nephew-killed-gaza/ https://www.thejournal.ie/brother-woman-nine-kids-gaza-6717437-May2025/ https://amp.rte.ie/amp/1515399/ https://www.oceanfm.ie/northwest-today-show/fundraiser-launched-after-sligo-doctors-9-nieces-and-nephews-killed-in-gaza-attack-504443 https://www.oceanfm.ie/news/dail-hears-of-devastation-caused-to-sligo-doctors-family-in-gaza-503064 https://m.independent.ie/regionals/sligo/news/sligo-doctors-nine-nephews-and-nieces-killed-in-devastating-gaza-attack/a121298480.html Episode Blurb Back with part two of our reaction to What's the most rational way to know? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNQlmVJxySc&t=3614s&ab_channel=CordialCuriosity), a discussion between Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian on the relationship between confidence and evidence. Listen to part 1 first, availble here: https://www.incrementspodcast.com/85 It seems weird to try to be funny in this blurb, given the introduction, so going to keep the description lean. Back with our usual lighthearted nonsense next episode! Check out more from Brett Hall here (https://www.bretthall.org/) and Peter Boghossian here (https://peterboghossian.com/). We discuss A falliblist's view of confidence Confidence as a form of implicit knowledge Problems with attempting to define "knowledge" Can we "derive" moral facts? Being triggered by the word 'derive' References Paper discussing how it took the wider scientific community over 40 years (after Eddington's experiment!) to become convinced in the truth of general relativity: The 1919 measurement of the deflection of light (https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.7812) Eddington's original paper (https://w.astro.berkeley.edu/~kalas/labs/documents/dyson1920.pdf): Vaden and Brett's blog exchange (https://vmasrani.github.io/blog/2023/predicting-human-behaviour/) Socials Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link Become a patreon subscriber here (https://www.patreon.com/Increments). Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here (https://ko-fi.com/increments). Click dem like buttons on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ) Please donate to: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-dr-alaa-alnajjar-and-her-family-in-gaza
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    1 hr and 20 mins
  • #85 (Reaction) - On Confidence and Evidence: Reacting to Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian (Part 1)

    #85 (Reaction) - On Confidence and Evidence: Reacting to Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian (Part 1)
    May 9 2025
    We all knew that Vaden would release his inner Youtube debate bro at some point. Well he finally paid Ben enough to do it, and here we are: our first reaction video. Today we're commenting on the video What's the most rational way to know? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNQlmVJxySc&t=3614s&ab_channel=CordialCuriosity), a discussion between Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian on the relationship between confidence and evidence. Are we overly confident in our ability to make reaction videos? Evidently. Check out more from Brett Hall here (https://www.bretthall.org/) and Peter Boghossian here (https://peterboghossian.com/). We discuss What is the relationship between confidence and evidence? The "formal apparatus of science" vs the "sociology" of science Eddington's famous experiment Why confidence and belief can't be mathematized (But why they are useful nonetheless) Confidence as a function of falsifying experiments Bayesianism vs critical rationalism References Paper discussing how it took the wider scientific community over 40 years (after Eddington's experiment!) to become convinced in the truth of general relativity: The 1919 measurement of the deflection of light (https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.7812) Eddington's original paper (https://w.astro.berkeley.edu/~kalas/labs/documents/dyson1920.pdf): Vaden and Brett's blog exchange (https://vmasrani.github.io/blog/2023/predicting-human-behaviour/) Socials Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link Become a patreon subscriber here (https://www.patreon.com/Increments). Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here (https://ko-fi.com/increments). Click dem like buttons on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ) Where were you last night, and why do you have condoms in your pocket? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.
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    1 hr and 50 mins
  • #84 - A Primer on Not Born Yesterday by Hugo Mercier

    #84 - A Primer on Not Born Yesterday by Hugo Mercier
    Apr 17 2025
    Some thoughts (arguments?) on Hugo Mercier's Not Born Yesterday (https://www.amazon.com/Not-Born-Yesterday-Science-Believe/dp/0691178704), which advances the thesis that humans are not as gullible as is commonly thought. This is our second episode on Mercier's work, and we're as intrigued as ever. But this time we have different interpretations of his thesis, so it's a good thing the man himself is coming on soon to sort us out. We discuss If humans are less gullible than is commonly believed Evolution of Communication Theory Gazelles jumping in the air Are humans too stubborn? Is one of your hosts who shall go unnamed too stubborn? When do humans actually change their minds? Does Mercier's work conflict with Popper? How much of our reasoning is motivated reasoning? How much is social conformity? Socials Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link Become a patreon subscriber here (https://www.patreon.com/Increments). Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here (https://ko-fi.com/increments). Click dem like buttons on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ) Did you know that "gullible" isn't in the dictionary? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • #83 - The Anxious Generation Round II: Alternative Explanations

    #83 - The Anxious Generation Round II: Alternative Explanations
    Mar 27 2025
    Round two on the anxious generation. Well, honestly, round three. But we had a false start with round two, which is why this episode is a little late in coming. If you want to hear the gory, data-heavy details of our second attempt, you can access the episode by becoming a patron (https://www.patreon.com/c/Increments) (was there ever a better sell?). We discuss Whether the rise in self-harm rates was due to reporting changes Whether education and common core could be affecting mental health Whether cultural pessimism is on the rise Cyberbullying Martin Gurri's thesis on the digital revolution How Vaden will handle social media with his kids References David Wallace Wells opinion piece (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/opinion/smartphones-social-media-mental-health-teens.html) Our patreon episode (https://www.patreon.com/posts/subscriber-ep-23-124502992) on David Wallace Wells' thesis Peter Gray on common core (https://petergray.substack.com/p/letter-51-common-core-is-the-main) Revolt of the Public (https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millennium/dp/1732265143/) Errata Ben said The Revolt of the Public was written in 2014. It was written in 2018. Vaden said he would list all four of Haidt's points about why girls are uniquely vulnerable to negative effects of social media, and only got halfway in before forgetting he said that. The four reasons Haidt gives are: Girls are more affected by visual social comparison and perfectionism Girls' aggression is more relational Girls more easily share emotions and disorders Girls are more subject to predation and harassment Quotes Here is a story. In 2007, Apple released the iPhone, initiating the smartphone revolution that would quickly transform the world. In 2010, it added a front-facing camera, helping shift the social-media landscape toward images, especially selfies. Partly as a result, in the five years that followed, the nature of childhood and especially adolescence was fundamentally changed — a “great rewiring,” in the words of the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt — such that between 2010 and 2015 mental health and well-being plummeted and suffering and despair exploded, particularly among teenage girls. For young women, rates of hospitalization for nonfatal self-harm in the United States, which had bottomed out in 2009, started to rise again, according to data reported to the C.D.C., taking a leap beginning in 2012 and another beginning in 2016, and producing, over about a decade, an alarming 48 percent increase in such emergency room visits among American girls ages 15 to 19 and a shocking 188 percent increase among girls ages 10 to14. Here is another story. In 2011, as part of the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a new set of guidelines that recommended that teenage girls should be screened annually for depression by their primary care physicians and that same year required that insurance providers cover such screenings in full. In 2015, H.H.S. finally mandated a coding change, proposed by the World Health Organization almost two decades before, that required hospitals to record whether an injury was self-inflicted or accidental — and which seemingly overnight nearly doubled rates for self-harm across all demographic groups. Soon thereafter, the coding of suicidal ideation was also updated. - David Wallace Wells, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/opinion/smartphones-social-media-mental-health-teens.html Studies confirm that as adolescents moved their social lives online, the nature of bullying began to change. One systematic review of studies from 1998 to 2017 found a decrease in face-to-face bullying among boys but an increase among girls, especially among younger adolescent girls.[47] ... According to one major U.S. survey, these high rates of cyberbullying have persisted (though have not increased) between 2011 and 2019. Throughout the period, approximately one in 10 high school boys and one in five high school girls experienced cyberbullying each year.[49] In other words, the move online made bullying and harassment a larger part of daily life for girls. \ - Haidt, The Anxious Generation p. 170 Socials Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link Become a patreon subscriber here (https://www.patreon.com/Increments). Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here (https://ko-fi.com/increments). Click dem like buttons on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ) Anyone you want to cyberbully into body dismorphia? Tell us who to send photos of our hot bods to over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.
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    1 hr and 21 mins
  • #82 - Are Screens Really That Bad? Critiquing Jon Haidt's "The Anxious Generation"

    #82 - Are Screens Really That Bad? Critiquing Jon Haidt's "The Anxious Generation"
    Mar 6 2025
    Anxiety, dispair, loneliness, depression -- all we need is a social media recession! A popular thesis is that All The Bad Things things are on the rise among adolescents because of social media, a view popularized in Jon Haidt's 2024 book The Anxious Generation. Haidt is calling for an end of the "phone-based childhood" and hoping that schools banish all screens for the benefit of its students. But is it true than social media is causing this mental health crisis? Is it true that there even is a mental health crisis? We do a deep dive into Haidt's book to discuss the evidence. We discuss A weird citation trend in philosophy Whether there is a mental health crisis among teens Some inconsistencies in Haidt's data on mental health outcomes Correlation vs causation, and whether Haidt establishes causation Why on earth do the quality of these studies suck so much? Whether Haidt's conclusions are justified References The Anxious Generation (https://www.amazon.com/Anxious-Generation-Rewiring-Childhood-Epidemic/dp/0593655036) Jon Haidt's After Babel Substack (https://www.afterbabel.com/) After Babel's main post (https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic) attempting to establish causation, and the response to critics (https://www.afterbabel.com/p/why-some-researchers-think-im-wrong). Collaborative review doc on adolescent mood disorders (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1diMvsMeRphUH7E6D1d_J7R6WbDdgnzFHDHPx9HXzR5o/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.rqnt07sjvlcd) Collaborative review doc on social media and mental health (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-olnkPyWcgF5BiAtBEy0/edit?tab=t.0) Matthew B Jane's criticism of Haidt's meta-analysis (https://matthewbjane.github.io/blog-posts/blog-post-6.html) Aaron Brown's criticism (https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evidence-that-social-media-is-causing-the-teen-mental-health-crisis/) Stuart Ritchie's criticism (https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/dont-panic-about-social-media-harming-your-childs-mental-health-the-evidence-is-weak-2230571) Peter Gray's criticism (https://petergray.substack.com/p/45-the-importance-of-critical-analyses) Datasets Unaggregated life satisfaction data for boys/girls ages 11/13/15 across 44 countries (https://data-browser.hbsc.org/measure/life-satisfaction/) Australia hospital admissions due to self harm (https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/intentional-self-harm-hospitalisations/intentional-self-harm-hospitalisations-by-age-sex) France hospital admissions due to self harm (https://drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/2024-05/ER1300EMB.pdf) Canada (https://yourhealthsystem.cihi.ca/hsp/inbrief?lang=en&_gl=1*rtyvsz*_gcl_au*MTA5ODMwMzc5MS4xNzM3NTAyMTk0*_ga*MTM0Njk4MTc4MS4xNzM3NTAyMTk0*_ga_44X3CK377B*MTczNzUwMjE5NC4xLjAuMTczNzUwMjIwNi4wLjAuMA..#!/indicators/083/self-harm-including-suicide/;mapC1;mapLevel2;sex(F);trend(C5001,C300);/) Ontario (https://www.cmaj.ca/content/195/36/E1210) # Socials Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link Become a patreon subscriber here (https://www.patreon.com/Increments). Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here (https://ko-fi.com/increments). Click dem like buttons on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ) No screen time for a month. If you send an email to incrementspodcast@gmail.com, we're taking away your iPad. Image credit: Is social media causing psychological harm to youth and young adults? (https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/social-media-causing-psychological-harm-youth-and-young).
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    1 hr and 53 mins
  • #81 - What Does Critical Rationalism Get Wrong? (w/ Kasra)

    #81 - What Does Critical Rationalism Get Wrong? (w/ Kasra)
    Feb 14 2025
    As whores for criticism, we wanted to have Kasra on to discuss his essay The Deutschian Deadend (https://www.bitsofwonder.co/p/the-deutschian-deadend). Kasra claims that Popper and Deutsch are fundamentally wrong in some important ways, and that many of their ideas will forever remain in the "footnotes of the history of philosophy". Does he change our mind or do we change his? Follow Kasra on twitter (https://x.com/kasratweets) and subscribe to his blog, Bits of Wonder (https://www.bitsofwonder.co/p/the-deutschian-deadend). We discuss Has Popper had of a cultural impact? The differences between Popper, Deutsch, and Deutsch's bulldogs. Is observation really theory laden? The hierarchy of reliability: do different disciplines have different methods of criticism? The ladder of abstractions The difference between Popper and Deutsch on truth and abstraction The Deutschian community's reaction to the essay References Bruce Nielson's podcast on verification and falsification: https://open.spotify.com/episode/38tGZnBlHK3vZHjyLgSs4C Popper on certainty: Chapter 22. Analytical Remarks on Certainty in Objective Knowledge Quotes By the nature of Deutsch and Popper’s ideas being abstract, this essay will also necessarily be abstract. To combat this, let me ground the whole essay in a concrete empirical bet: Popper’s ideas about epistemology, and David Deutsch’s extensions of them, will forever remain in the footnotes of the history of philosophy. Popper’s falsificationism, which was the main idea that he’s widely known for today, will continue to remain the only thing that he’s widely known for. The frustrating fact that Wittgenstein is widely regarded as a more influential philosopher than Popper will continue to remain true. Critical rationalism will never be widely recognized as the “one correct epistemology,” as the actual explanation (or even the precursor to an explanation) of knowledge, progress, and creativity. Instead it will be viewed, like many philosophical schools before it, as a useful and ambitious project that ultimately failed. In other words, critical rationalism is a kind of philosophical deadend: the Deutschian deadend. - Kasra in the Deutschian Deadend There are many things you can directly observe, and which are “manifestly true” to you: what you’re wearing at the moment, which room of your house you’re in, whether the sun has set yet, whether you are running out of breath, whether your parents are alive, whether you feel a piercing pain in your back, whether you feel warmth in your palms—and so on and so forth. These are not perfectly certain absolute truths about reality, and there’s always more to know about them—but it is silly to claim that we have absolutely no claim on their truth either. I also think there are even such “obvious truths” in the realm of science—like the claim that the earth is not flat, that your body is made of cells, and that everyday objects follow predictable laws of motion. - Kasra in the Deutschian Deadend Deutsch writes: Some philosophical arguments, including the argument against solipsism, are far more compelling than any scientific argument. Indeed, every scientific argument assumes the falsity not only of solipsism, but also of other philosophical theories including any number of variants of solipsism that might contradict specific parts of the scientific argument. There are two different mistakes happening here. First, what Deutsch is doing is assuming a strict logical dependency between any one piece of our knowledge and every other piece of it. He says that our knowledge of science (say, of astrophysics) implicitly relies on other philosophical arguments about solipsism, epistemology, and metaphysics. But anyone who has thought about the difference between philosophy and science recognizes that in practice they can be studied and argued about independently. We can make progress on our understanding of celestial mechanics without making any crucial assumption about metaphysics. We can make progress studying neurons without solving the hard problem of consciousness or the question of free will. - Kasra in the Deutschian Deadend, quoting Deutsch on Solipsism At that time I learnt from Popper that it was not scientifically disgraceful to have one's hypothesis falsified. That was the best news I had had for a long time. I was persuaded by Popper, in fact, to formulate my electrical hypotheses of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission so precisely and rigorously that they invited falsification - and, in fact, that is what happened to them a few years later, very largely by my colleagues and myself, when in 1951 we started to do intra- cellular recording from motoneurones. Thanks to my tutelage by Popper, I was able to accept joyfully this death of the brain-child which I had nurtured for nearly two decades and was immediately able to contribute as much as I could to the chemical transmission story which was the ...
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    1 hr and 39 mins
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