Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 263.

It's a public health crisis just like you know cities created a public health

process around sanitation and washing your hands and we all we're all going through this

cultural change we're going to have to generationally learn to do the informational

equivalent of washing our hands. But you know like germs misinformation was always out there

and you know the truth is always being hard to come by.

That is the voice of Dr. Tom Stafford, the psychologist at the University of Sheffield

and in this episode we will hear all about some recent research he has conducted

which sheds new light on how we might be able to use science to update the way we create

online gathering places so we can get the most out of our natural evolved tendencies

and abilities to argue and disagree and deliberate instead of spiraling ever deeper

into polarized dead-end debates. Don't get me wrong there are all sorts of bad things

happening in the world there are all sorts of places where harm can be reduced there's a lot of

poison that could be extracted from the human experience right now but I'm going to try to make

a case in this episode that there are better ways of going about doing that when it comes to

arguing and it comes to deliberation and it comes to having conversations with people

who see the world much differently than you do. But before we go into all of that I need to set up

what we're talking about in this episode the science behind what we're talking about which is in many

ways an admission of how wrong I was about something that drove my own reasoning for years

which is we are flawed and irrational when it comes to reasoning and intuition and all sorts of

other stuff that goes into the human psychological experience I don't really feel that way anymore

...