Political outcomes would be relatively simple to predict and understand if only people were well-informed, entirely rational, and perfectly self-interested. Alas, real human beings are messy, emotional, imperfect creatures, so a successful theory of politics has to account for these features. One phenomenon that has grown in recent years is an alignment of cultural differences with political ones, so that polarization becomes more entrenched and even violent. I talk with political scientist Lilliana Mason about how this has come to pass, and how democracy can deal with it.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/17/305-lilliana-mason-on-polarization-and-political-psychology/

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Lilliana Hall Mason received her Ph.D. in political psychology from Stony Brook University. She is currently an SNF Agora Institute Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity and co-author (with Nathan Kalmoe) of Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy.

• Web Site
• Hopkins web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Bluesky

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The Trump administration, led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, has proposed sweeping cuts to spending on science research here in the US, in particular at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. I explain a little about what is being cut and why these funds are important to scientific progress. I try, for what it's worth, to provide these explanations in a way that would be informative to those who generally favor cutting government waste in dramatic fashion.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/12/bonus-cuts-to-science-funding-and-why-they-matter/

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• Indirect costs primer
• Cuts to NIH indirect costs
• Appropriated funds are mandated by statute
• Proposed NSF cuts
• Elon Musk doesn't understand indirect costs
• Shrimp treadmill story
• Bribing foreign officials
• Deleting NSA web pages
• Executive Orders are not laws
• History of impoundments

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It is a feature of many human activities - sports, cooking, music, interpersonal relations - that being able to do them well doesn't necessarily mean you can accurately describe how to do them well. Science is no different. Many successful scientists are not very good at explaining what goes into successful scientific practice. To understand that, it's necessary to study science in a scientific fashion. What kinds of scientists, in what kinds of collaborations, using what kinds of techniques, do well? I talk with James Evans, an expert on collective intelligence and the construction of knowledge, about how science really works.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/10/304-james-evans-on-innovation-consolidation-and-the-science-of-science/

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James Evans received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University. He is currently the Max Palevsky Professor of History and Civilizations, Director of Knowledge Lab, and Faculty Director of Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago; External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute; External Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna; and Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google.

• Knowledge Lab web site
• University of Chicago web page
• Google scholar publications

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