A recent paper argues that as part of our evolutionary heritage, we're better at detecting the flaws in an opponent than in our own case. We're just constitutionally bad at gritting our teeth and looking for errors in what we believe and our reasons for it. But we're very good at ferreting out the errors in what the other side believes. And if you've got a deficiency there, then you get abnormal secading. If you have abnormal secading, that means you're not looking where you should be looking when you should be looked. That is a profound deficit.
Daniel Dennett is one of the world's most original and provocative thinkers. A philosopher and cognitive scientist, he is known as one of the 'Four Horseman of New Atheism' along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens. In 2013 he came to Intelligence Squared to share the insights he has acquired over his 40-year career into the nature of how we think, decide and act. Dennett revealed his favourite thinking tools, or 'intuition pumps', that he and others have developed for addressing life's most fundamental questions. As well as taking a fresh look at familiar moves - Occam's Razor, reductio ad absurdum - he discussed new cognitive solutions designed for the most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, consciousness and free will.
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