Episode 20 - Reflections on a Year of Beautiful Illusions

Darron and Jeff look back at the first nineteen episodes that comprise year one of their Beautiful Illusions podcast project. They discuss some of their favorite episodes, how their thinking has changed over time, how they have tried to implement in their lives some of the concepts that they've been discussing, they revisit many of the ideas that they had delved into over the past year including politics and pizza, beer and baseball, system 1 and system 2, and many of the books and thinkers that they've referenced throughout the show. It’s a fun and freewheeling conversation that touches on the big ideas they attempted to tackle and sets the stage for the next year of exploration.

Notes:

• 2:43 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 10 - Craft Beer Culture: A Personal History from January 2021

• 3:56 - Tornado, Julius, Green-ish, and Green are all terrific offerings from the Tree House Brewing Company

• 5:02 - Budweiser Zero - “Enjoy the same great taste of Budweiser you know and love without the alcohol. Bud Zero is a non-alc brew with 50 calories, 0 grams of sugar and is made for those who want to cut back on alcohol without missing out on the full flavor and refreshment of Budweiser.”

• 5:10 - Athletic Brewing Company

• 6:30 - Miller High Life

• 6:43 - Listen the Beautiful Illusions Episode 19 - How We Learn Like A Scout: Critically Thinking About Critical Thinking from October 2020, which is centered around a discussion of two books: The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't by Julia Galef and How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine...for Now by Stanislas Dehaene

• 7:36 - Listen and read “This is Water” (Farnam Street Blog) by David Foster Wallace 

• 8:18 - In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, psychologist Jonathan Haidt characterizes the human mind as a partnership between separate but connected entities using the metaphor of the rider and the elephant - the rider represents all that is conscious and is the director of actions and executor of thought and long term goals, while the elephant represents all that is automatic, and often acts independently of conscious thought. According to Haidt, our problem is that we overemphasize the power and importance of our conscious verbal thinking and neglect the other components of our mind. In his book, he argues that we must improve our understanding of these divisions and learn to let them operate in harmony, not compete for control. 

• 8:33 - For more on “System 1” and “System 2” see  “Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice” from Scientifc American, excerpted from Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

• 9:56 - The Social Dilemma

• 11:27 - See the “Chariot Allegory” Wikipedia entry 

• 15:46 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 08 - System 2, Superman, & Simulacra: Jeff's Amateur Philosophy from December 2020

• 17:59 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 11 - Darwin & The Dude: Darron's Journey to Poetic Naturalism from February 2021

• 19:38 - Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

• 21:58 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 03 - The Examined Life from September 2020 and see the “I know that I know nothing” Wikipedia entry

• 23:00 - For a nice summary of Dehaene’s 4 pillars see ”Did neuroscience find the secrets of learning?” (Article by Stanislas Dehaene, Paris Innovation Review, 2013) and  “Science: These are the 4 Pillars of Learning” (Daniel Gogek)

• 24:09 - The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

• 27:50 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics from November 2020 and Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts from April 2021

• 29:44 - Motivated reasoning (Wikipedia)

• 30:14 - Marketplace of ideas (Wikipedia)

• 30:35 - See “Why Chimpanzees Don’t Hold Elections: The Power of Social Reality” by Lisa Feldman Barrett (Undark, 2021) - “We all live in a world of social reality that exists only inside our collective human brains. Nothing in physics or chemistry determines that you’re leaving the United States and entering Canada, or that an expanse of water has certain fishing rights, or that a specific arc of the Earth’s orbit around the sun is called January. These things are real to us anyway. Socially real.”

• 32:38 - First proposed in 2004 by psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph, and popularized in Haidt’s 2012 book The Righteous Mind, the Moral Foundations Theory suggests that their are at least 6, and possibly more, common themes, or foundations, upon which moral systems are built around the world, these include care and harm, fairness and cheating, loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, sanctity and degradation, and liberty and oppression. The theory proposes that each one of us comes equipped with an ‘intuitive ethics’, which is an innate capacity to feel flashes of approval or disapproval towards these patterns of human behaviour. These unconscious and automatic intuitions reflect pre-wired reactions that we evolved to have but each of them can be either amplified or toned down by factors unique to each individual such as personality, environment, and experiences. This leads to different moral and political views across and within cultures. Haidt envisions Moral Foundations Theory as facilitating new approaches to resolving and understanding moral conflicts, through the recognition that cultures built their unique moralities on top of a foundation of shared, universal intuitions, and in the political context this might help us resist the urge to leap to the least charitable explanation of our political opponent’s behaviour, instead encouraging us instead to first try reframing their perspective as being grounded in a particular moral foundation to see how their opinion is still based in the foundations we all share. For more on Moral Foundations Theory see “Moral Foundations Theory” (Conceptually), the Moral foundations theory Wikipedia page, read chapter 7 of The Righteous Mind which outlines Haidt’s 6 moral foundations of politics, “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2009), and watch Haidt’s 2012 TED Talk on “The moral roots of liberals and conservatives” (YouTube)

• 35:13 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March 2021

• 35:30 - Homunculus 

• 35:38 - Watch the Statue of Liberty, Higher and Higher scene from Ghostbusters 2 (YouTube)

• 37:54 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens from June 2021

• 41:19 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 17 - BI Book Club 1: The Reality Bubble from August 2021 where we discuss The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong, and then follow that up with Episode 18 - Making Progress Better where we continue to explore themes raised in the previous episode

• 42:47 - See “What has Quantum Mechanics Ever Done For Us?” (Forbes) and “How Your Smartphone Uses Quantum Mechanics” (Quantum)

• 45:29 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 04 - Too Cultured from October 2020

• 45:43 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 05 - It’s Alive! from October 2020

• 46:46 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza from July 2021

• 47:50 - We ate the Cheeseburger Pizza from Tipsy Tomato in Derby, CT, along with the Loaded Mashed Potato and Baked Stuffed Shrimp pizzas 

• 48:30 - Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletana

• 50:52 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 09 - Lying About Santa: Naughty or Nice? from December 2020

• 52:37 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 01 - Why It's Pointless to Start a Podcast in a Pandemic from September 2020

• 52:48 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 02 - Our Back Pages from September 2020, which was actually recorded in 2019 with the intention of becoming the first episode of Beautiful Illusions

• 53:55 - Listen to “My Back Pages” by Bob Dylan and read the lyrics

• 54:16 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 07 - Boxing Aristotle from November 2020

• 54:24 - See the Ten Year Reading Plan from The Great Conversation Reading Group

• 54:38 - Listen to the Brain Science podcast

• 1:03:58 - So my intuition about initially being off here is indeed correct, and by at least two orders of magnitude, estimates of the number of podcasts are generally based on the freely available Apple Podcasts Statistics webpage, and as of the moment of this recording the number stands at 2,389,570 valid podcasts, which is where the oft-cited “over 2 million podcasts” number comes from, which is up from about 800,000 in 2019. But this total number can be deceiving. According to a closer analysis presented by Steven Goldstein writing for Amplifi Media, roughly 26% of total podcasts only ever produced one episode, if we set the bar at 3 episodes the number rises to 44%, well under 2,000,000, and only about 36% or just over 700,000 podcasts have 10 or more episodes. For more see Apple Podcasts Statistics and  “Why there really aren’t 2 million podcasts” (Amplifi Media, 2021)

• 1:07:05 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Heinrich

• 1:07:43 - Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut