Very Bad Wizards

Episode 122: Nothing but a "G" Thing (Intelligence Pt. 1)

August 29th, 2017  |  1 hr 40 mins

cognitive neuroscience, dogs, fmri, intelligence, iq

David and Tamler do their best to talk frankly about intelligence and IQ research. (It's our Patreon listener-selected topic! We probably would never have chosen this one on our own...). Is intelligence a meaningful, definable concept? Can we reliably test for it? How much of the variability in IQ across individuals is due to heritable factors? Are people with higher IQ happier, wealthier, or healthier than people with lower IQ? And why is this topic so controversial anyhow? Plus in the intro segment Tamler and David discuss why you probably don't need fMRI to know what your dog wants, and why cognitive neuroscience seems to confuse otherwise intelligent folks. (Note: This is Part 1 of our discussion on intelligence. In Part 2 will delve into the slightly more controversial topics of IQ, race, and gender).

Episode 121: The Beauty of Illusion - David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive"

August 15th, 2017  |  1 hr 29 mins

david lynch, mulholland drive

Guest Yoel Inbar joins David and Tamler to break down David Lynch’s dreamy masterpiece Mulholland Drive. (FULL SPOILERS – watch before you listen!) What’s real and what’s illusion? What happens when our illusions unravel? How do expectations affect our experience? How can artists use our expectations to manipulate our emotions? Come for the questions, stay for the answers – or at least for more questions.

Episode 120: Clap Your Hand for Robert Wright

July 25th, 2017  |  1 hr 47 mins

buddhism, evolutionary psychology, robert wright

Special guest Robert Wright joins the podcast to discuss his latest book "Why Buddhism is True." What is the Buddhist conception of not-self? When we become aware that the boundaries between us and the world are fluid, what is the “we” that arrives at this insight? Can daily meditation make you less of a dick? How does evolutionary psychology bear on these questions? Plus, Dave horrifies Tamler with his new hipster habit.

Episode 119: A Brief History of Values

July 11th, 2017  |  1 hr 26 mins

debunking arguments, porn, values

What happens when we discover why we believe the things we believe? What if we discover that our values are the product of our cultural tradition, or personal experience, or natural selection? Should we be more skeptical of our values once we learn their history? Plus, data on Google porn searches reveal that you're all a bunch of sick fucks.

Episode 118: We Don't Love Them Hoax

June 27th, 2017  |  1 hr 12 mins

campus politics, conceptual penis hoax, james lindsay

David and Tamler try to put the topic of campus politics to bed once and for all – with limited success. First, we get into a big fight about the prevalence and danger of political correctness in American universities. We junked that recording, and tried to distill our best points into a new one. (Trust us – it was for the best.) We also narrow down all the topic recommendations from our beloved Patreon supporters to five finalists. In the second segment, James Lindsay (co-author of the "Conceptual Penis" hoax) joins us to talk about why he thinks the hoax was more successful in exposing gender studies than some of their critics (including us) have suggested.

Episode 117: Extended Minds, Extended Foreskins

June 13th, 2017  |  1 hr 11 mins

distributed cognition, extended mind, male circumcision

David and Tamler break down a recent classic in the philosophy of mind: "The Extended Mind" by Andy Clark and David Chalmers. What is
boundary of your mind? Is it contained with your body, or does it extend to the external environment--to your laptop, notebook,
smartphone and more? Is this a purely terminological question, or one with practical and moral significance? And what is the role of
intuition in providing an answer? Plus, Dave shares an email alerting him to the psychological trauma of male circumcision along
with an exciting all-natural method for restoring the foreskin (that was stolen from us as infants).

Episode 116: Pain, Pleasure, and Peer-Reviewed Penises

May 31st, 2017  |  1 hr 16 mins

conceptual penises, happiness, pain, pleasure, sokal hoax, taste

David and Tamler break down the latest small-stakes academic controversy--yes the one about conceptual penises. Does the recent "Sokal-like" hoax expose the ideological extremism of gender studies? Or does it show that certain portions of the "skeptic" community are susceptible to the same biases as their opponents? In the main segment they discuss the problems with measuring pain, pleasure, and happiness. When your doctor asks you to rate your pain between 1 and 10 and you say a 7, does your '7' reflect the same subjective experience as another person's '7'? (That depends--have you experienced childbirth?) How can we get more accurate readings of pain and pleasure across different people with different experiences? Most importantly, which number gets you the Vicodin?

Episode 115: Which Field is More Fu@%ed: Philosophy or Psychology?

May 16th, 2017  |  1 hr 37 mins

David and Tamler go ambulance chasing for scandals in their own fields. Inspired by a tweet from Jay Van Bavel, they argue about which of their disciplines--philosophy or psychology--is more completely and irredeemably fucked. Is the recent controversy at the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia diagnostic of larger problems in philosophy? Can the replication crisis ever be solved? Can philosophy return to studying the big questions? What can psychologists actually discover about the human mind?

Warning: this episode features a more respectful and mature dialogue than some VBW listeners may be comfortable with.

Episode 114: Great Vengeance and Furious Anger (Top 5 Movies About Revenge)

May 4th, 2017  |  1 hr 21 mins

movies, passover, revenge, vengeance

Somehow, after 113 episodes David and Tamler have never done a top 5 movie episode about revenge (so unbelievable that we had to double-check). That changes today. Among the things we learned: good revenge movies are harder to find than we thought, revenge (at least, movie revenge) is messy, and David knows at least one movie that Tamler has never heard of. Plus, should Jews be celebrating the killing of Egyptian first borns? Or atoning for it? (Or perhaps just pouring out a little more wine at Passover?)

Episode 113: Pascal, Probability, and Pitchforks

April 18th, 2017  |  1 hr 18 mins

expected utility, god, pascal's mugging, pascal's wager

David and Tamler break down what may be the best argument that it's rational to believe in God: Pascal's Wager. (No, we're not just trolling our Sam Harris listeners.) Does the expected value of believing in God outweigh the probability that you're wrong? How does belief work--can you just turn it on and off? What if you believe in the wrong God? This leads to a wide-ranging discussion on decision theory, instrumental rationality, artificial intelligence, transformative experiences, and whether David should drop acid. Your brain AND you future self will love this episode!

Episode 112: Gettier Goggles

April 4th, 2017  |  1 hr 31 mins

epistemology, gettier cases, monogamy, skepticism

For four years Tamler has been bitching about Gettier cases without even explaining what they are or why he hates them. That ends today. David and Tamler talk about the famous paper that challenged the (widespread? non-existent?) notion that knowledge is, and only is, justified true belief. We talk about the so-called skeptics about knowledge that Gettier inspired, then discuss the real skepticism that Descartes examined with his evil demon thought experiment. Plus, you know how you're in a monogamous relationship because of science? Well, turns out that science may be flawed....

Episode 111: Our Language Doesn't Have a Word For This Title (with Yoel Inbar)

March 22nd, 2017  |  1 hr 3 mins

In Part 2 of our episode with film scholar Yoel Inbar (AOS: Quebecois New Wave Cinema), we break down the philosophy and psychology of the movie Arrival.

Episode 110: Stepsisters and Neck Braces (with Yoel Inbar)

March 14th, 2017  |  41 mins 50 secs

Special guest Yoel Inbar joins Tamler and David to discuss the Charles Murray protest at Middlebury College (and the top porn searches by State).

Episode 109: Moral Pluralism: Behind the Lube

February 28th, 2017  |  1 hr 11 mins

Tamler and Dave discuss moral pluralism.

Episode 108: The Gimp Exception

February 7th, 2017  |  1 hr 14 mins

Tamler and David discuss moral hypocrisy.

Episode 107: Winking Under Oppression (with Manuel Vargas)

January 24th, 2017  |  1 hr 21 mins

Philosopher Manuel Vargas joins us to talk about moral responsibility under oppression.