Dr. Michael Shermer received a lot of interesting and constructive responses to episode 151, his commentary on the events of January 6, 2021 — the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters. In episode 152, Shermer responds to critics, reminding us that the truth or falsity of a claim of any kind that can be adjudicated by science and reason applies not just to astrologers, psychics, UFO proponents, and Big Foot hunters (all of which we cover in Skeptic magazine), but to conspiracy theories, including and especially those in the realm of politics, economics, and ideology, which as we’ve seen matters very much to the stability of our democracy and trust in the institutions that keep society stable. Whether a particular conspiracy theory is true or false very much matters.
Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place
Born into a Cult (Michelle Dowd)
UFOs: What We Know (And Don’t Know)
Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity
Vulnerable Minds: The Harm of Childhood Trauma and the Hope of Resilience
How to Achieve Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
How Likely Is War Over Taiwan?
Neuroscientist Explains Selective Memory (Charan Ranganath)
Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives
How to Think About Social Justice
Sean Carroll Explains Quantum Field Theory
Co-Founder of The Free Press reports on the Culture Wars (Nellie Bowles)
The Latest Research on Consciousness (Christof Koch)
Everything is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos
The Science of Happines
How Rhetoric Shapes Your Opinions
Accomplishment and Happiness (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker)
Should We Prepare for Nuclear War? (Annie Jacobsen)
An AI... Utopia? (Nick Bostrom, Oxford)
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