Is There a Difference Between Free Will and Determinism?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I want to ask you about the whole issue of free will and determinism, or compatibleism. I don't know what your position is on this. How do you think about volition and moral culpability and accountability in a world filled with all these determining or influencing variables? You now ifyou're a social scientist like you, youve spent your whole life looking at factor that influence us,. determine us to think or to act a certain way. So te the evolutionary hypothesest, they have some appeal, but i think the case is relatively weak.

Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients. Now imagine that the same doctor making a different decision depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. This is an example of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical.

Shermer speaks with Nobel Prize winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman about the detrimental effects of noise and what we can do to reduce both noise and bias, and make better decisions in: medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection.