Chris Martin July 30, 2018

Show Notes

Rick Mehta (@RickRMehta) is a professor of psychology at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. His research focuses on the mechanisms involved in decision making. He has recently begun to study viewpoint diversity in universities and Canadian psychology departments specifically. His talk Free Speech in Universities: Threats and Opportunities covers the philosophy and psychology of free expression.

The Canadian state of affairs [0:00]

Rick’s big talk on free speech [3:52]

Drug dealers are more open than professors [9:07]

The bullshit receptivity scale [13:12]

Consequences for Rick’s heterodoxy [17:06]

Continuing research on decision making [23:25]

See the full list of episodes of Half Hour of Heterodoxy >>

Selected Quote

Rick Mehta: After I did my talk at ideacity Conference held in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, a filmmaker came up to me, a Canadian documentary filmmaker and she said she had no trouble in the past getting drug dealers to appear before her camera and speak about their experiences. But that she was having difficulty getting professors—tenured professors—to appear before a camera. So they said that if they did, they would be willing to speak but it was on the condition of having anonymity.

Transcript

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Transcript of Episode 30: Rick Mehta on Free Expression in Canadian Universities.