Very Bad Wizards

Latest Episodes:

Episode 88: A Doobie for Elijah Apr 26, 2016

Show notes

David and Tamler celebrate Passover with a high-spirited episode on guns, revenge, liberals, being offended, the fear of death, and whether kids have a right to be loved. Thanks to all you listeners for emailing your questions, comments, and complaints--this was a fun, energetic discussion. Plus, a blast from the past from an unusually alert Pizarro: Michael Shannon reading a sorority letter. But won't somebody please think of the children???!!

Links

Mr. Robot Season 2 premiere date [usanetwork.com]
Michael Shannon reads sorority letter [youtube.com]
George Rainbolt's review of "The Right to be Loved" by Matthew Liao [npdr.nd.edu]
The Right to be Loved by S. Matthew Liao [amazon]
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker [wikipedia.org]
A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell [wikipedia.org]
The Story of Philosophy by Wil Durant
Rick and Morty [imdb.com]
Marijuana is Kosher [npr.org]
Louis CK on the Bill Simmons podcast [youtube.com]
Is Shame Necessary? by Jennifer Jacquet [amazon.com affiliate link]
Jennifer Jacquet [jenniferjacquet.com]

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Episode 87: Lucky You (with Robert Frank) Apr 12, 2016

Show notes

We hit the jackpot with this one! Economist Robert Frank (you may remember him from such episodes as The Greatest Books Ever Written) joins David and Tamler to talk about his new book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. What role does pure chance play in making or breaking our careers and lives? Are effort and talent enough to succeed, or does the ball need to bounce our way? Where do we get our will-power and talent--is that ultimately a matter of luck as well? And what happens when we reflect on the lucky breaks we've received in our lives? Does it make us happier and more generous? Or do we feel like our accomplishments have been taken away? Plus a brief discussion of the Frank's revelatory 1988 book Passions Within Reason, and of some recent studies about how we convey our commitment to cooperate.

Links

Robert Frank [johnson.cornell.edu]
Robert Frank interviewed on Fox News by Stuart Varney [video.foxbusiness.com]
Ronald Coase [wikipedia.org]
Everett, J.A.C., Pizarro, D. A. & Crockett, M.J., (in press). Inference of Trustworthiness from Intuitive Moral Judgments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. [papers.ssrn.com]
Passions within Reason by Robert Frank [amazon.com affiliate link]
Frank, R. H., Gilovich, T., & Regan, D. T. (1993). The evolution of one-shot cooperation: An experiment. Ethology and sociobiology, 14, 247-256.
Desteno, D., Breazeal, C., Frank, R. H., Pizarro, D., Baumann, J., Dickens, L., & Lee, J. J. (2012). Detecting the trustworthiness of novel partners in economic exchange. Psychological science, 23, 1549-1556. [pdf from davedesteno.com]
Frank, R.H. (2016) Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. [amazon.com affiliate link]

Special Guest: Robert Frank.

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Episode 86: Guns, Shame, and the Meaning of Punishment Mar 22, 2016

Show notes

We know that criminal punishment has consequences, both good and bad, and that many people think that offenders deserve it. But what does punishment mean? What is society trying to express in the way it punishes criminals? And since people from all sides of the political spectrum agree that the prison population is way too big, is there a way to convey that meaning with alternative forms of sanctions? David and Tamler discuss Yale Law Professor Dan Kahan's classic paper "What do alternative sanctions mean?" that addresses these questions. But first, Tamler gets sanctimonious about other people being sanctimonious about guns on campus. At the risk of angering "that student," we "go there."

Links

University of Houston Faculty Devises Pointers on How to Avoid Getting Shot by Armed Students by Elliott Hannon [slate.com]
A PowerPoint Slide Advises Professors to Alter Teaching to Pacify Armed Students by Rio Fernandes [chronicle.com]
Kahan, D. M. (1996). What do alternative sanctions mean? The University of Chicago Law Review, 63(2), 591-653. [law.yale.edu]
Moskos, P. (2013). In defense of flogging. Basic Books. [amazon.com affiliate link]

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Episode 85: A Zoo with Only One Animal (with Paul Bloom) Mar 12, 2016

Show notes

Philosophers can be funny and funny movies can be philosophical. David and Tamler welcome frequent VBW guest and arch-enemy of empathy Paul Bloom to discuss their five favorite comic films with philosophical/psychological themes. Groundhog Day was off-limits for our top five (we would've all chosen it) so we start by explaining why it's the quintessential movie for this topic.

Links

[all movie links are to imdb.com]

Paul's Top 5
Tamler's Top 5
David's Top 5
- Office Space
- Dr. Strangelove
  - Pinker, S. (1999). "The Doomsday Machine" in How the mind works. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 882(1), 119-127.
- Brazil
- Trading Places
- The Princess Bride

Special Guest: Paul Bloom.

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Episode 84: Lifting the Veil Feb 23, 2016

Show notes

David and Tamler talk about the perils of trying to step outside of your own perspective in ethics, science, and politics. What do Rawls' "original position" thought experiment, Pascal's Wager, and Moral Foundations Theory have in common? (Hint: it involves baking.) Plus, what movies (and other things) would serve as a litmus test when deciding on a potential life partner? What might liking or not liking a certain film, book, or TV series tell you about a person, and whether or not the relationship would work? And what sexual position is it rational to choose under the veil of ignorance? (It's a night episode...)

Links

Part 1: Litmus Tests
- The Bad News Bears (1976) [imdb.com]
- A Confederacy of Dunces [wikipedia.org]
- Drive [imdb.com]
  - Every Frame A Painting--Drive: The Quadrant System [youtube.com]
- Ferris Bueller's Day Off [imdb.com]
- The Far Side [wikipedia.org]
- Frank [imdb.com]
- Hustle and Flow [imdb.com]
- Jackie Brown [imdb.com]
- Key and Peele [imdb.com]
- Miracle of Morgan's Creek [imdb.com]
- The Office (UK) [imdb.com]
- Pulp Fiction [imdb.com]
- Spaghetti Western [wikipedia.org]
  - ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement/Dubbing) [wikipedia.org]
- Sullivan's Travels [imdb.com]
- Spellbound [imdb.com]
- Slapshot [imdb.com]
- What We Do in the Shadows [imdb.com]
Part 2:
- Williams, B. (1981). Rawls and Pascal's Wager. Moral Luck, 94-100. [verybadwizards.com]
  - Moral Luck [amazon.com affiliate link]
- Moral Foundations Questionnaire (30-item) [moralfoundations.org]

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Episode 83: Ego Trip Feb 09, 2016

Show notes

David and Tamler continue their series of breaking down a classic essay/article in their fields. For this installment, David assigns Tamler Anthony Greenwald's fascinating 1980 review article "The Totalitarian Ego." What do totalitarian regimes, scientific theories, and your own cognitive biases have in common? As it turns out, quite a bit. Why do egos rewrite our memories, preserve our beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence, and make us think we're way more important than we are? And how does Thomas Kuhn fit into all this? Plus, we read a few of our favorite iTunes reviews.

Links

Audience video of Society for Personality and Social Psychology 2016 Session on Moral Purity with Kurt Gray, Jon Haidt, David Pizarro (courtesy of Kate Johnson) [youtube.com]
Greenwald, A. G. (1980). The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history. American psychologist, 35, 603. [verybadwizards.com]

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Episode 82: Totalitarian Slide-Rulers Jan 26, 2016

Show notes

David and Tamler take a break from their main jobs as TV critics to talk about a masterpiece in political philosophy: "Two Concepts of Liberty" by Isaiah Berlin. While they both celebrate the style and substance of this classic essay, in a startling twist Tamler praises conceptual analysis and David expresses a few misgivings about his Kantianism. What is the elusive idea of positive liberty, and how can its pursuit lead to totalitarian rule? When is it more important to buy boots than read Russian poetry? And why is David still so depressed by pluralism? Plus, coddling in Wisconsin? And another famous set of social psych studies is accused of biting the dust.

Links

In Wisconsin, Efforts to End Taunting at Games Lead to Claims of Coddling By Mike McPhate [nytimes.com]
Take my Breath Away by Berlin [youtube.com]
Cortex Podcast Episode #20 [relay.fm]
Amy Cuddy "Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are" TED Talk [ted.com]
"The Power of the Power Pose: Amy Cuddy's Famous Finding is the Latest Example of Scientific Overreach" By Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung [slate.com]
Berlin, I. (1958) "Two Concepts of Liberty." In Isaiah Berlin (1969) Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [verybadwizards.com]
Positive and Negative Liberty [plato.stanford.edu]
Freedom: Block Distractions

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Episode 81: Domo Arigato, Mr. Robot (With Yoel Inbar) Jan 12, 2016

Show notes

Hello, listener. Hello, listener? That's lame. Maybe I should give you a name, but that's a slippery slope. You're only in my head. Or maybe we're in your head. Are you listening to this with headphones?

Shit. It's actually happened, I'm talking to imaginary listeners.

What I'm about to tell you is top secret, a conspiracy bigger than all of us. There's a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. I'm talking about the guys no one knows about, the guys that are invisible. The top 1% of the top 1%, the guys that play God without permission. That's right, it's the Partially Examined Life guys. And now I think they're following me.

Special guest Yoel Inbar joins us to talk about the best show of last year. Warning: This episode is full of spoilers. Do not listen until you've seen Season 1 of Mr. Robot.

Links

Mr. Robot
- IMDB
- Wikipedia

Special Guest: Yoel Inbar.

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Episode 80: The Coddling of the Wizard Mind (with Vlad Chituc and Christina Hoff Sommers) Dec 21, 2015

Show notes

It's our last episode on campus protests and political correctness for a while, we promise! But it's a fun one. David and Tamler welcome two guests on the opposite side of the debate spectrum. Recent Yale Alum, cognitive scientist, freelance writer, (and writer of novel-length emails) Vlad Chituc joins both of us to defend the Yale protests, provide some context, and explain why the good people at FIRE are hypocritical about free expression. In the middle segment, Tamler talks with his notorious stepmother and "factual feminist" Christina Hoff Sommers (author of "Who Stole Feminism?" and "The War Against Boys"). They argue over whether the new political correctness poses a serious threat to campus climate, whether it is even "new," and over whether one is obligated to smoke weed on Joe Rogan's podcast. Plus, Tamler gets all huffy about the panic over terrorism, and we read some email responses to VBW Episode 78 ("Wizards Uprising"). Oh, and we have a recording a date set for the Mr. Robot episode!

Links

Vlad Chituc [vladchituc.com]

Christina Hoff Sommers [aei.org]

"Fear in the Air, Americans Look Over Their Shoulders" [nytimes.com]

The Coddling of the American Mind [theatlantic.com]

Who Stole Feminism by Christina H. Sommers [amazon.com affiliate link]

The War Against Boys by Christina H. Sommers [amazon.com affiliate link]

"CDS Appropriates Asian Dishes, Students Say" [oberlinreview.org] (ht/@brittanyepage)

Special Guests: Christina Hoff Sommers and Vlad Chituc.

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Episode 79: Good Lives, Good Friends, and Gay Mormons (with Valerie Tiberius) Dec 04, 2015

Show notes

Special guest Valerie Tiberius joins us to talk about values, well-being, and friendship. What role should reflection play in the good life? What about emotion? How can we make our values more consistent and sustainable? Do we know our friends better than we know ourselves? Plus, are philosophers experts? Experts of what? What are the boundaries of our discipline? And what motivates a gay Mormon to stay in the Church? In the first segment, David and Tamler list a few things they're grateful for on Thanksgiving, including you, the listeners (awwwwww...)

Links

National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation [wikipedia.org]
Valerie Tiberius personal website [sites.google.com]
Tiberius, V. (2012) Cell Phones, iPods, and Subjective Well-Being. In Brey, P., A. Briggle & E. Spence (Eds.). The good life in a technological age. Routledge. [verybadwizards.com]
Desire theories of well-being ( from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Well-Being) [plato.stanford.edu]

Special Guest: Valerie Tiberius.

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