Episode 20 - Reflections on a Year of Beautiful Illusions

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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.

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Episode 19 - How We Learn Like A Scout: Critically Thinking About Critical Thinking

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Darron and Jeff discuss what it means to teach critical thinking in the classroom. They begin with a few concerns they share about how this is currently done, then move into an exploration of how ideas from two books, “The Scout Mindset” by Julia Galef, and “How We Learn” by Stanislas Dehaene, might be used to develop a more useful conception of critical thinking and provide insight into how it, or anything else, might be taught and learned more successfully. They conclude with a brainstorming session geared towards the development of a new unit that Jeff can implement in his English classes during the upcoming school year using the ideas they previously discussed.

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Episode 18 - Making Progress Better

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Jeff and Darron continue to discuss ideas related to and inspired by last month’s Book Club episode, in which they discussed The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong. Jeff presents his idea for a long term Beautiful Illusions book project, and they begin exploring the nature of progress. What is it? What’s wrong with the way we talk about it, and how might we improve our conversations about progress? They discuss the difficulties associated with notions such as defining a minimum level of comfort for 7+ billion humans, and the seemingly impossible task of presenting information in a way that speaks to people from varied and diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and cultures without shutting down necessary dialogue.

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Episode 17 - BI Book Club 1: The Reality Bubble

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In this first Book Club episode Jeff and Darron discuss The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong. Subtitled “How Science Reveals the Hidden Truths that Shape Our World” the book explores the various ways in which our perception of the world is very different from what’s actually there, and how this is true because of our biology, the workings of our modern economic and political world, and the intergenerational, evolving nature of culturally inherited concepts. Jeff offers a critique of Tong’s presentation which leads to a discussion about the difficulties of presenting information that can be perceived as negative or anti-progress, and the importance of seeing reality as it is, grappling with hard truths, and trying our best to find a balanced perspective.

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Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza

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Jeff and Darron explore the nature of conservatism and progressivism by looking at pizza and other food preferences. They talk about the nature of category designations, what it means to call something by a specific name, and why this can sometimes feel so important to us. They look at their own preferences and inclinations towards conservative or progressive thinking, examine where they might come from, and how they are often dependent on context. They touch on the benefits of honing an existing process versus trying new techniques and methods, the importance and drawbacks of categories and categorization, and finally how we might use an examination of our personal preferences about food to better understand the larger sociopolitical and cultural context in which we find ourselves.

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Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens

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Jeff and Darron explore an idea first proposed in episode 12 - developing an analytical cognitive lens that uses concepts from cognitive science and related fields in order to better integrate modern neuroscientific and psychological concepts into our engagement with fiction and our understanding of the actions, motivations, and biases of characters. Starting with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of the The Gilded Age, The Great Gatsby, they discuss how our own experience arriving at a particular book at a particular time influences the way we perceive it, and then apply various concepts such as cognitive dissonance and self-justification, the illusory nature of memory and the self, and how our brains are “tuned and pruned” by experience, to understand why the characters behave the way they do and what that might teach us about human nature.

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Episode 14 - Talkin' Baseball Stories & Beautiful Illusions

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Jeff and Darron have a casual conversation about the beautiful illusion of baseball. They talk about their own experiences centered around the narrative of baseball as something passed from father to son, delve a bit into the myth and magic on offer through baseball history, discuss the dissonance they both experience at times being Yankee fans, and tell a lot of personal stories about going to games. Jeff describes how his engagement with the narrative of baseball has changed over time, and Darron talks about how through the years he somehow still manages to buy into the naive magical view of the National Pastime. It’s a relatively loose, fun conversation that leaves a lot on the table for future exploration.

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Made with love using Windows Paint…

Made with love using Windows Paint…

Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts

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Jeff and Darron continue their conversation about the difficulties of having political conversations. They discuss how we determine what’s true and how our conscious perceptions might not reflect reality to the extent that we believe, how well-meaning people looking at the same evidence can come to different conclusions based on their prior life experiences, how our lived reality is socially constructed to a degree of which we are generally unaware, and how all of these factors interact in the context of our current information environment to make political discussions particularly fraught and ripe for disagreement over even our most basic assumptions about reality. Finally they discuss what we might do as individuals to try and make our own conversations less acrimonious and more productive.

Jeff and Darron continue their conversation about the difficulties of having political conversations.

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Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism

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Jeff and Darron explore some of the major ideas of Enlightenment thought that have shaped our current historical era. Jeff lays out his vision for a new Enlightenment - an age of cognitivism - that applies current insights gleaned from neuroscience and related fields about how brains and cognition work, and the limits of current conceptions of reason, in order to more fully realize the progressive vision of the original Enlightenment movement. Building off the work of two influential scientists and thinkers, biologist E.O. Wilson and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, they discuss the predictive nature of our brain, the possibility of seeding our brain today to predict better in the future, and how the unification of the humanities and sciences might allow us to fully embrace what it means to be creative beings who are shaped by both biological and cultural evolution.

Jeff and Darron explore some of the major ideas of Enlightenment thought that have shaped our current historical era. Jeff lays out his vision for a new Enlightenment - an age of cognitivism - that applies current insights gleaned from neuroscience and related fields about how brains and cognition work, and the limits of current conceptions of reason, in order to more fully realize the progressive vision of the original Enlightenment movement.

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Episode 11 - Darwin & The Dude: Darron's Journey to Poetic Naturalism

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Jeff and Darron explore a few of the major ideas that shaped Darron’s perception and thinking about the world. They talk about how an early encounter with the work of Charles Darwin started him down a path towards scientific thought and empiricism as a way of understanding the world, how one man’s quest to get his rug back reinforced his roughly existentialist personal philosophy, and how embracing poetic naturalism gave him a framework for unifying the various layers of reality, both fundamental and emergent, science, and art into a more coherent worldview.

Jeff and Darron explore a few of the major ideas that shaped Darron's perception and thinking about the world.

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Episode 10 - Craft Beer Culture: A Personal History

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Darron and Jeff talk about their experiences and relationship with beer from their late teens to present day. In the process of highlighting a few specific beers and their associated memories that hold special significance for them, they explore their relationship to the once burgeoning, but now booming world of craft beer. They examine how our their own personal tastes and interests evolved along with the craft industry, and how craft beer exemplifies active participation in culture. 

Darron and Jeff talk about their experiences and relationship with beer from their late teens to present day. In the process of highlighting a few specific beers and their associated memories that hold special significance for them, they explore their relationship to the once burgeoning, but now booming world of craft beer.

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