Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

If you're like me, you know some people, maybe friends or colleagues, who believe

untrue things. Their beliefs are false, incorrect for some reason. Don't you hate it when

that happens? It may even be true. This is a wilder idea, but your friends might think

that you have some untrue beliefs. That's even more annoying. Why does this happen? Why

do people believe different things? Even when they're quite educated about them, right?

I mean, you might think that if people just didn't know that much about something, they

might be uncertain in their beliefs and be corrected when they get more information,

but that's not what we see, especially in the social sphere, the political sphere,

culture war, kinds of questions. People believe things despite the fact that there's a whole

bunch of people who believe other things and are trying hard to convince them. And we have

a special problem these days with the media landscape, with technology. We're flooded

with information, with opinions, with attempts to change our minds much more than ever before.

So there's actually two questions going on here. One is what is the information or the

sets of claims to which we are being subjected, right? Are we in filter bubbles? Is the news

media trying to be accurate? Or are we just hearing things that are tribal or politically

slanted in some way? So how do we control the relationship between our attention and the

information we get? And as a society, how should we try to make sure that the information

being given out is relatively accurate or safe for whatever you want it to be? The other

question is then, what do we do with that information that we get? What kinds of information

change our minds? We'd like to imagine a kind of Bayesian utopia where we have propositions

that we assign credences to, and new evidence comes in, we update our credences. But people

...