What if We Found Fossil Rabbits in the Pre Cambrian?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Yes o a jbs was famously asking, what would it take to change your mind about evolution? And steve gouldma has a funny story used to tell about a that dwain gish would quote from this geology text book. He said if you get out of your car and you walk over, you can see the thrust beds that pushed up and flip the bedding so that the older beds were on top of the younger beds. That's really terrific. We now have a prettyplas it sounds like we have a pretty plausible model of how a rock bed can be turned over by geological forces.

Astonishingly irrational ideas are spreading. COVID-19 denial, anti-vaxxers compromising public health, conspiracy thinking hijacking minds and inciting mob violence, toxic partisanship cleaving our nations, the return of Flat Earth theory… What the heck is going on? Why is all this happening, and why now? More important, what can we do about it? Does our “right to our opinion” trump our responsibilities? Does the resulting ethos effectively compromise mental immune systems, allowing “mind parasites” to overrun them? Are conspiracy theories, evidence-defying ideologies, and garden-variety bad ideas all species of mind parasites, each of which employs clever strategies to circumvent mental immune systems? In this conversation, based on the book Mental Immunity, Andy Norman shows that minds and cultures have immune systems, and that they really can break down. Fortunately, he assures us that they can also be built up: strengthened against ideological corruption. Can his ideas revolutionize our capacity for critical thinking?