143: "Why bad beliefs happen to good people" - Philosopher Neil Levy - Sentientism

Neil is a professor of philosophy with research interests spanning philosophy of mind, psychology, free will, moral responsibility, epistemology & applied ethics. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics & professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. From 2010, he was head of neuroethics at the Florey Institutes of Neuroscience in Melbourne. He has written many papers & books, including “Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People“.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?”

Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.

We discuss:

00:00 Welcome

- Is Neil a #Sentientist ?

02:05 Neil's Intro

- Perpetual winters between Oxford & Sydney

- Philsophy of applied ethics, free will, epistemology

- Neil's episode on #DecodingTheGurus re: intellectual virtue signalling

03:55 What's Real?

- Brought up #jewish "very much a cultural thing... synagogue twice a year" in #southafrica Africa

- Jewish Saturday school

- Moving to #Australia & attending religious school

- At 11-12 "This doesn't make much sense to me - this god business. I've been a convinced #atheist ever since"

- "Being religious can be perfectly reasonable"

- Subjective rationality "how well are you processing your evidence given where you are?"

- "People are much more rational than we think... even #QAnon supporters... they're completely wrong... but if they believe what they're saying... they're rational given where they start"

- #Trolling & #bullshit

- "We've got lots of evidence people don't believe what they're saying"

- #Determinism & #freewill & "the epistemic condition on responsibility"... "nobody does have that kind of control over their beliefs... they've done the best they can with the evidence available to them"

- "Criticism comes cheap... so does praise"

- "Luck explains so much" constitutive & present luck

- "It gives us more to do... of the sort of things philosophers aren't good at"

- Teaching critical thinking, logic, fallacies "people get better... but they don't get better at using it outside the classroom"

- "In the classroom I give you evidence... they stipulate it... you just accept it"... "But in the real world you're faced with the continual problem... should I trust the evidence?"

- A key reason people don't update beliefs given new evidence is because "they just don't trust the evidence in the first place... and you can formally model why they shouldn't... given what they already believe"

- The "capital punishment views" experiment

- "If somebody shows me a prima facie plausible study showing that... all dogs have 5 legs... I'm going to think... that it's bullshit"

- Bayesianism

- Gullibility, dogmatism, #skepticism

- #QAnon , #Antivaxx , #homeopathy

...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.

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