Release date: March 18th, 2019

John Nerst

This episode features John Nerst, data scientist and blogger at everythingstudies.com, discussing a potential new field called "erisology," the study of disagreement. John and Julia discuss why Twitter makes disagreement so hard; whether there's anything to learn from postmodernism; John's "signal and corrective" model that explains why disagreement persists even when people agree on the key facts; and how the concept of "decoupling" helps explains Sam Harris and Ezra Klein's debate last year about IQ.

Links

John’s website

John’s Twitter

"Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate" by Ullica Segerstrale

"The Signal and the Corrective"

"A Deep Dive Into the Harris-Klein Controversy"

Edited by Brent Silk

Music by Miracles of Modern Science

Full Transcripts