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politics
Yoel and Mickey welcome Clay Routledge to the show. Clay is a professor of psychology at North Dakota State University who studies the cognitive and motivational consequences of the search for meaning, including religion and other supernatural beliefs. Clay talks about his childhood growing up as the child of missionaries in Africa and the U.S., what it's like to be outside the liberal mainstream in psychology, and how religion and belief in alien visitors may be connected.
In episode 3, titled WTF is the IDW, Yoel and Mickey take a deep dive into the so-called Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). What is the IDW and who are the prominent members of this group? Why do members of the IDW seem so cranky? Are members of the IDW actually being silenced, and given their massive popularity, who is silencing them? Is the IDW a positive and new development in our culture? Should the members of the IDW be concerned about some of their fans and followers? Bonus: Why did Yoel decide to have us drink the champagne of beers?
In episode 2, titled You're not wrong Walter, you're just an a$$hole, Yoel and Michael tackle problems of tone and incivility in online discussions of the scientific literature. What constitutes bullying and is the term abused to derail legitimate criticism? What is an ad hominem attack and when is it a fallacy? Finally, who's our favorite member of the Black Goat podcast?
In episode 1, titled In Search of the Campus Free Speech Crisis, Yoel and I tackle the alleged free speech crisis on campus. Is there reason to worry or are reports of left-wing intolerance overblown? We take a closer look and talk about what we do and don't feel comfortable saying on campus. We also address who we are we and why are we doing this.
A 28-year-old woman with a busy social life spends hours on end talking to her A.I. boyfriend for advice and consolation. And yes, they do have sex.
Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, said people were more willing to share private information with a bot than with a human being. Generative A.I. chatbots, in turn, respond more empathetically than humans do. In a recent study, he found that ChatGPT’s responses were more compassionate than those from crisis line responders, who are experts in empathy. He said that a relationship with an A.I. companion could be beneficial, but that the long-term effects needed to be studied.
“If we become habituated to endless empathy and we downgrade our real friendships, and that’s contributing to loneliness — the very thing we’re trying to solve — that’s a real potential problem,” he said.
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Understanding the effort paradox can help you reshape your relationship to exertion so that you commit to those hard but truly meaningful activities
“On the one hand, effort is costly,” says Michael Inzlicht, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada. “On the other hand, it looks like we tend to value those things that we exerted effort for.” In a seminal 2018 paper, he and his colleagues dubbed this apparent conflict the “effort paradox”. Since then, psychologists have been figuring out the origins of the effort paradox and why some of us struggle with tasks that others might find easy. What they are finding is offering fresh insights not only into how you can get off the couch and into your running shoes, but also how you can learn more effectively, better empathise with others and even cultivate a more meaningful life. “[It seems] that if we can become…
University of Toronto professor Michael Inzlicht wanted to find out who's better at empathic responses: people, or ChatGPT. He explains to CBC Metro Morning how AI won the empathy contest.
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