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

And if you're anything like me, you're surrounded by other people who are wrong about all sorts of important things.

Now, of course, people can be wrong for all sorts of different reasons, right?

I mean, maybe they're just not that smart. Maybe they just end up being not quite clever enough to get the right answer.

Or maybe they're just not informed to be a little bit less judgmental about it.

Maybe they don't have the right background, the right information to reach correct conclusions.

But there's other people who you no doubt notice seem to be really smart and yet keep getting things wrong,

or at least get something wrong in a really, really important way.

And in some sense, it's their fault, right?

If someone is just uninformed, you don't blame them for being wrong,

unless you blame them for being uninformed. But you could just say, well, they didn't know any better.

But there's cases out there where you recognize that people really should know better.

And there's something about that person that is preventing them from being correct.

My guest today is Kasim Kasam. He is a philosopher at the University of Warwick in the UK.

And he's written a book on intellectual vices.

The book is called Vices of the Mind from the Intellectual to the Political.

And the point of the word vice here is that this is something that is preventing you from getting the right answer

in a blame-worthy way. We've all talked about cognitive biases or other things like that.

Sometimes, the cognitive bias can be an intellectual vice,

but other times, it's sort of inevitable. So it's a slightly different kind of category.

So Kasam is talking about all the different ways in which people get things wrong

in important but in principle, correctable ways, ways that we can really blame them for getting wrong.

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