Rationally Speaking Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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Rationally Speaking Podcast

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture
Science

Frequency: 1 episode/17d. Total Eps: 263

Libsyn
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.
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  • 🇨🇦 Canada - philosophy

    11/06/2026
    #65

  • 🇬🇧 Great Britain - philosophy

    11/06/2026
    #66

  • 🇨🇦 Canada - philosophy

    10/06/2026
    #86

  • 🇨🇦 Canada - philosophy

    09/06/2026
    #54

  • 🇨🇦 Canada - philosophy

    08/06/2026
    #95

  • 🇨🇦 Canada - philosophy

    05/06/2026
    #59

  • 🇩🇪 Germany - philosophy

    05/06/2026
    #45

  • 🇨🇦 Canada - philosophy

    04/06/2026
    #44

  • 🇨🇦 Canada - philosophy

    03/06/2026
    #51

  • 🇨🇦 Canada - philosophy

    02/06/2026
    #97

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Score global : 38%

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Is cash the best way to help the poor? (Michael Faye)

Episode 263

jeudi 23 décembre 2021 • Duration 52:13

The idea of giving poor people cash, no strings attached, is "very unappealing" for most donors, admits economist Michael Faye -- but it's still one of the best ways to help the poor. Michael and Julia discuss the philosophy behind his organization (GiveDirectly), the evidence we have so far about cash transfers as an anti-poverty intervention, and the various concerns people have about it: How long-lasting are the effects? Does it make recipients less likely to work? Does it cause inflation?

Humanity on the precipice (Toby Ord)

Episode 262

vendredi 10 décembre 2021 • Duration 01:08:54

Humanity could thrive for millions of years -- unless our future is cut short by an existential catastrophe. Oxford philosopher Toby Ord explains the possible existential risks we face, including climate change, pandemics, and artificial intelligence. Toby and Julia discuss what led him to take existential risk more seriously, which risks he considers underrated vs. overrated, and how to estimate the probability of existential risk.

Intellectual honesty, cryptocurrency, & more (Vitalik Buterin)

Episode 253

jeudi 4 mars 2021 • Duration 01:16:40

Julia and guest Vitalik Buterin (creator of the open-source blockchain platform Ethereum) explore a wide range of topics, including: Vitalik's intellectually honest approach to leadership, why prediction markets appear to be biased in favor of Trump, whether it was rational to invest in Bitcoin ten years ago, Vitalik's defense of life extension research against its critics, and more.

Rationally Speaking #163 - Gregg Caruso on "Free Will and Moral Responsibility"

dimanche 10 juillet 2016 • Duration 59:39

If people don't have free will, then can we be held morally responsible for our actions? And what would happen to society if we were to collectively shed our belief in free will? In this episode Julia talks with philosopher Gregg Caruso, who advocates a position of "optimistic skepticism" on the topic. Skepticism because people don't have free will as a sense of moral responsibility, but optimistic because society would be better off if we accept that we do.

Rationally Speaking #162 - Sean Carroll on "Poetic Naturalism"

dimanche 26 juin 2016 • Duration 50:26

Naturalism is the stance that everything that exists in the universe arises from "natural" causes, of the sort observable by science -- not supernatural ones. It's practically a foundational tenet of skepticism. But does it imply that there can be no meaning, or purpose, or morality in the universe? This episode features physicist Sean Carroll, author of the recent bestseller The Big Picture: on the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself. Sean and Julia talk about the new "ism" he introduces in the book, "poetic naturalism," and how it attempts to resolve the apparent conflict between science on the one hand, and things like morality, free will, consciousness, and meaning on the other.

Rationally Speaking #161 - Tom Griffiths and Brian Christian on "Algorithms to Live By"

dimanche 12 juin 2016 • Duration 49:29

Julia chats with the authors of Algorithms to Live By, about how to apply key algorithms from computer science to our real life problems. For example, deciding which apartment to rent, planning your career, and prioritizing your projects. In the process, they discuss the assumptions that underlie those algorithms (and what to do about the fact that those assumptions are inevitably violated by the messy real world), and why procrastination might actually be the right algorithm for the wrong problem.

Rationally Speaking #160 - Live at NECSS -- Jacob Appel on "Tackling bioethical dilemmas"

dimanche 29 mai 2016 • Duration 01:07:07

It's the annual live Rationally Speaking episode, taped at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism in NYC! This year features returning guest Jacob Appel, a bioethicist (and lawyer, and psychiatrist). Jacob and Julia discuss various bioethical dilemmas, such as: How do you handle parents who want to withhold medical treatment from their child for religious reasons? Is it unethical for American doctors to test new medications in the third-world? And what kinds of principles does a bioethicist use to justify their decisions, beyond "that's just my personal opinion"?

Rationally Speaking #159 - Colin Allen on "Do fish feel pain?"

dimanche 15 mai 2016 • Duration 55:39

In this episode Julia talks with philosopher of cognitive science Colin Allen about whether fish can feel pain. In the process they explore a cluster of related questions: Are fish conscious, and how could we tell? What's the difference between pain and suffering? And are there evolutionarily adaptive reasons why animals would have the subjective experience of pain, as opposed to just instinctive reflexes to avoid potentially harmful stimuli?

Rationally Speaking #158 - Dr. George Ainslie on "Negotiating with your future selves"

dimanche 1 mai 2016 • Duration 47:23

Ever make a plan to diet, or exercise, or study, and then -- when the scheduled hour rolls around -- decide, "Nah, I'll just put it off another day"? If you said "no," I don't believe you! This episode features behavioral psychiatrist (and economist) George Ainslie, who demonstrated the existence of this ubiquitous phenomenon in human willpower, called hyperbolic discounting, in which our preferences change depending on how immediate or distant the choice is. George and Julia discuss why hyperbolic discounting exists, and how it can be modeled as a negotiation between your current self and your future selves. In the process they explore some of the benefits and risks of this "intertemporal bargaining" approach to willpower, and how it relates to philosophical thought experiments such as the Prisoner's Dilemma and Kavka's Toxin.

Rationally Speaking #157 - Dr. Herculano-Houzel on "What made the human brain special?"

dimanche 17 avril 2016 • Duration 51:41

For centuries, scientists have wondered what makes humans so much smarter than other species. Some proposed it was the size of our brain (though that didn't explain why whales weren't smarter than us); others thought it was the size of our brain relative to our body size (but there were problems with that explanation as well). In this episode, neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel lays out the mystery of the "Human advantage," and explains how a new technique she invented several years ago has shed light on some of these longstanding mysteries.

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