Rationally Speaking
New York City Skeptics
Rationally Speaking is the bi-weekly podcast of New York City Skeptics. Join host Julia Galef and guests as they explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense, likely from unlikely, and science from pseudoscience. Any topic is fair game as long as we can bring reason to bear upon it, with both a skeptical eye and a good dose of humor! We agree with the Marquis de Condorcet, who said that in an open society we ought to devote ourselves to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them."Rationally Speaking was co-created with Massimo Pigliucci, is produced by Benny Pollak, and is recorded in the heart of New York City's Greenwich Village.
Episodes
Are Boomers to blame for Millennials' struggles?
Nov 9 2020 • 3592 MIN
Rationally Speaking returns from hiatus with a look at a clash between two generations: Millennials, and their parents' generation, the Baby Boomers. Faced with stagnant wages and rising costs of e...
Rationally Speaking #244 - Stephanie Lepp and Buster Benson on "Seeing other perspectives, with compassion"
Nov 30 2019 • 2534 MIN
This episode features a pair of interviews on a similar topic: First, Stephanie Lepp (host of the Reckonings podcast) discusses what she's learned from interviewing people who had a serious chang...
Rationally Speaking #243 - Bryan Caplan on "The Case for Open Borders"
Nov 12 2019 • 2959 MIN
The idea of open borders -- letting people move freely between countries, taking a job wherever they can find a job they want -- is still a pretty fringe position, politically speaking. But economi...
Rationally Speaking #242 - Keith Frankish on "Why consciousness is an illusion"
Oct 29 2019 • 2606 MIN
Philosopher of mind Keith Frankish is one of the leading proponents of “illusionism,” the theory that argues that your subjective experience -- i.e., the "what it is like" to be you -- is a trick o...
Rationally Speaking #241 - Thibault Le Texier on "Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment"
Oct 15 2019 • 3298 MIN
The Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the most famous psychology experiments in history. For decades, we've been told that it proves how regular people easily turn sadistic when they are asked t...
Rationally Speaking #240 - David Manheim on "Goodhart's Law and why metrics fail"
Sep 17 2019 • 3549 MIN
If you want to understand why things go wrong in business, government, education, psychology, AI, and more, you need to know Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a ...
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