Very Bad Wizards

Latest Episodes:

Episode 38: The Greatest Movies Ever Made about Personal Identity Dec 31, 2013

Show notes

Who is the real you? What happens to your identity when your body gets cloned or reconstituted with all the same memories and character traits? Does society construct our true selves or repress them? Can we ever escape our pasts and become different people? Dave thinks conceptual analysis and arousal measuring devices can solve all these problems but allows Tamler his dream of temporarily becoming the host of a movie podcast. They list their top 5 favorite movies about personal identity. Plus, do they have to eat still more crow--this time from Sam Harris?

Links

Personal Identity [plato.stanford.edu]

Google Glass [youtube.com]

Tamler's Top 5

5. Fight Club 4. A Clockwork Orange 3. Infernal Affairs 2. Moon 1. A History of Violence

David's Top 5

5. Blade Runner 4. Vertigo 3. Looper 2. Groundhog Day 1. Back to the Future

Honorable Mentions

Solaris (Russian version)
Being John Malkovich
Memento
My Fair Lady
All of Me
Zelig
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
Spirited Away
The Prestige
Shutter Island
Unforgiven
Side Effects
Any Star Trek Movie

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Episode 37: Porn, Poop, and Personal Identity (with Nina Strohminger) Dec 17, 2013

Show notes

The guest we've been waiting for--Nina Strohminger--joins us to talk about the connection between disgust and humor, cheap laughs, moral character and personal identity, and the British opt-in plan for porn. Plus: how psychologists measure erections and Dave goes Platonist about the form of hilarity. Tamler's daughter should have issued an extra strong disclaimer for this one.

Links

Nina Strohminger [ninastrohminger.com]
David Cameron Proposes Porn Filter [thedailybeast.com]
Strohminger, N. and Nichols, S. (in press). The Essential Moral Self. Cognition.

Special Guest: Nina Strohminger.

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Episode 36: An Irresponsible Meta-Book Review of Joshua Greene's "Moral Tribes" Nov 25, 2013

Show notes

Our most irresponsible episode ever! Dave and Tamler talk about two reviews of a book they haven't read--Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them--and feel only a little shame. (Since the recording, at least one of us has finished the book). Can Greene successfully debunk all non-utilitarian intuitions? Does Greene have a dark enough view of human nature? What would an ideal moral world look like? Will Dave ever stop making fun of Tamler's haunted boy haircut? We answer all of these questions and more. Plus we respond to a listener's email and read a couple of our favorite iTunes reviews.

Links

Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them by Joshua Greene [amazon.com]
Joshua Greene's website [harvard.edu]
Why can't we all just get along? The uncertain biological basis of morality. Robert Wright reviews "Moral Tribes" for The Atlantic.
You Can't Learn About Morality from Brain Scans: The problem with moral psychology. Thomas Nagel Reviews "Moral Tribes" for the New Republic
If you don't already have it, Tamler's interview with Joshua Greene and Liane Young in his book A Very Bad Wizard is worth the read [amazon.com]
On Debunking (Tamler's five part series of posts at Eric Schwitzgebel's blog The Splintered Mind)

*book links are amazon affiliate links. They are the same price for you but sends a few pennies our way.

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Episode 35: Douchebags and Desert Nov 11, 2013

Show notes

Dave and Tamler talk about the influence of character judgments on attributions of blame. What is the function of the blame--to assign responsibility or to judge a person's character? Is it fair that we blame douchebags more than good people who commit exactly the same act, or is it yet another cognitive bias that should be avoided? Plus we delve into the Richie Incognito hazing story (maybe a little early since the story has developed) and Tamler tries to figure out how to teach the Gospels to students who know roughly 100 times as much about them than he does.

Links

"The Miami Dolphins and Everything that Will Never Make Sense." by Andrew Sharp. (grantland.com)
Interview with Richie Incognito (youtube.com)
Gospel of Matthew [wikipedia.org]
Synoptic Gospels [wikipedia.org]
Pizarro, D.A. & Tannenbaum, D. (2011). Bringing character back: How the motivation to evaluate character influences judgments of moral blame. In M. Mikulincer & Shaver, P. (Eds) The Social psychology of morality: Exploring the causes of good and evil. APA Press.
A recent chapter on character and moral psychology that David wrote (with Roy Baumeister) just to be able to talk about comics and porn : Superhero Comics as Moral Pornography. In R. Rosenberg (Ed.) Our Superheroes, Ourselves. Oxford University Press.
Tannenbaum, D., Uhlmann, E. L., & Diermeier, D. (2011). Moral signals, public outrage, and immaterial harms. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(6), 1249-1254.

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Episode 34: Does Reading Harry Potter Make You Moral? (with Will Wilkinson) Oct 28, 2013

Show notes

Special guest Will Wilkinson joins the podcast to talk about whether fiction makes us better people, and to discuss his recent Daily Beast article that trashed Dave's profession and livelihood. Also, Dave and Tamler try to make sense of Ancient Greek justice in a myth about incest, adultery, daughter-killing, husband-killing, matricide, cannibalism, and trash talking to disembodied heads.

Links

Agamemnon [wikipedia.org]
Will Wilkinson [wikipedia.org]
The Will Wilkinson article that hurt David's feelings [thedailybeast.com]
Hurt Feelings by Flight of the Concords [youtube.com]
Does great literature make us better? by Gregory Currie [nytimes.com]
Reading literature makes us smarter and nicer by Annie Murphy Paul [time.com]
Want to learn how to think? Read fiction by Tom Jacobs [psmag.com]
In Pursuit of Happiness Research [pdf] by Will Wilkinson

Special Guest: Will Wilkinson.

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Episode 33: Monkeys, Smurfs, and Human Conformity (With Laurie Santos) Oct 14, 2013

Show notes

Special guest Laurie Santos (Psychology, Yale) joins us to talk about what animal cognition can tell us about human nature. Why are other primates better at resisting the misleading influence of others than humans? Is conformity a byproduct of our sophisticated cultural learning capacities? Are we more like Chimpanzees or Bonobos? Why does Dave spend so much time writing Smurf fan fiction? [Smurf you, Tamler. -dap]. Also, Dave and Tamler talk about a scathing review of Malcolm Gladwell's new book, and Eliza Sommers poses the question of the day. This was a fun one.

Links

Comparative Cognition Laboratory [yale.edu]
Laurie Santos and Jesse Bering on The Mind Report [bloggingheads.tv]
Buy Jesse Bering's latest book "Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us" [amazon.com affiliate link]
Philospher's Pipe (a directory of podcasts related to philosophy) [philosopherspipe.com]
Smurfette [wikipedia.org]
Horner, V., & Whiten, A. (2005). Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Animal cognition, 8(3), 164-181.
KovÃ¡cs, Ã. M., TÃ©glÃ¡s, E., & Endress, A. D. (2010). The social sense: Susceptibility to othersâ€™ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science, 330(6012), 1830-1834.
True Bonobo Love [youtube.com]
Bonobos vs. Chimps [youtube.com]
What does the fox say? [youtube.com]
"The Trouble With Malcolm Gladwell." by Christopher Chabris [Slate.com].
"Christopher Chabris Should Calm Down" by Malcolm Gladwell [Slate.com]

Special Guest: Laurie Santos.

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Episode 32: Disagreeing About Disagreement Sep 30, 2013

Show notes

Part II of our discussion on Rai and Fiske (sort of): We answer a listener's email and in the process get into an episode long argument about moral intuitions, psychological facts, the implications of moral disagreement. Before that, we talk about the recent study about testicles and parenting. We don't play small ball on this one.

Links

Testicular volume is inversely correlated with nurturing-related brain activity in human fathers [pnas.org]
"Study: You May be a Terrible Dad Because You Have Enormous Testicles"
"Aw Nuts! Nurturing Dads Have Smaller Testicles, Study Shows"
"Want to Know if Your Partner Will Be a Good Dad? Measure His Testicles."
Frances Kamm [wikipedia.org]
Reflective Equilibrium [plato.stanford.edu]
Doris, J. M., and Plakias, A. (2008). "How to Argue about Disagreement: Evaluative Diversity and Moral Realism." In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality. Cambridge: MIT Press

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Episode 31: An Anthropologist's Guide to Moral Psychology (Pt. 1) Sep 16, 2013

Show notes

In the first of a two-part episode, we discuss one of our favorite recent papers--Tage Rai and Alan Page Fiske's 2011 paper on how social relationships shape and motivate our moral emotions and judgments. We also talk about Sam Harris' $20,000 Moral Landscape Challenge, and whether there's any real chance of convincing him that the arguments he made in The Moral Landscape (first published in English in 2011) are wrong.

Links

Sam Harris' Moral Landscape Challenge [samharris.org]

Alan Fiske's overview of Relational Models Theory [sscnet.ucla.edu]

Tage Rai's research [kellogg.northwestern.edu]

Rai, T. S., & Fiske, A. P. (2011). Moral psychology is relationship regulation: moral motives for unity, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality. Psychological review, 118, 57-75. [irsp.ucla.edu]

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Episode 30: The Greatest Books Ever Written Sep 02, 2013

Show notes

Dave and Tamler celebrate their one year anniversary and 30th episode with one of their least cynical episodes yet. They talk about 5 philosophy/psychology(-ish) books that influenced and inspired them throughout the years. They also respond to a listener email that accuses them (mostly Tamler) of being "reckless and irresponsible" in their discussion of responding to insults.

Episode Links

(Please note that the Top 5 links below are to purchase books through amazon.com via the Very Bad Wizards amazon affiliate account)

Tamler's Top 5

5. The Razor's Edge

4. Culture Of Honor: The Psychology Of Violence In The South (New Directions in Social Psychology)/Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence

3. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Popular Science)

2. Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions

1. Jacques the Fatalist and His Master (Penguin Classics)

David's Top 5

5. Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman

4. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

3. The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology

2. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

1. Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions

Honorable Mentions

Revenge: A Story of Hope. Laura Blumenfeld

Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel

The Fragility of Goodness by Martha Nussbaum

Not by Genes Alone: by Peter Richerson and Richard Boyd

The Principles of Psychology by William James

Descartes Error by Antonio Damasio

Beyond Good and Evil

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper

The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin

Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong by J.L. Mackie

Finally...

David shows Richard Dawkins "Lemon Party"

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Episode 29: PEDs, Tenure Pills, and "Hyberbolic Chambers" Aug 19, 2013

Show notes

Dave and Tamler try to artificially bulk up their expertise on the ethics of performance enhancing drugs and end up raising a lot more questions than they answer. Why do we condemn certain methods for boosting performance on the playing field and praise others? Why is it OK to train at high altitudes but not in hyperbaric chambers that simulate high altitudes? Why is Lance Armstrong a villain and Graham Greene (who wrote many of his most famous novels on benzedrine) a hero? Is there genetic therapy to cure haunted child haircuts, and if there is, how can Tamler get access to it? Of course, no discussion on PEDs would be complete without clips from South Park and Sanford and Son. Also, David misremembers Lyle Alzado as a regular on an 80's sitcom because of a single appearance on "Small Wonder." We probably should have taken some podcast enhancing drugs for this one.

Links