Gah, humans. Do your research, they say. Do your own research.

Watch YouTube videos, listen to podcasts, question the mainstream narrative. Open your eyes.

Is that the path to wisdom? Or is it the path to madness? Can it perhaps be both? I've lately become something of

an agitator against taking too much personal responsibility for understanding every issue.

The world is just too complicated. We need to outsource most complex facts about the world to people who spend their whole lives

studying them. It is just not rigorous. It feels rigorous, but it's not rigorous to see an academic

paper tweeted by someone with a PhD on Twitter and to let that outweigh the considered opinions of the mainstream

establishment, which knows how to put that paper in context and what the countervailing

evidence might be and how to weigh that paper against others that contradict it and how to

adjust for statistical anomalies that I might not be well trained enough to consider.

We just can't do all of that by ourselves. We can't all be experts in everything. But on the other hand, we also don't want to be sheeple.

We don't want to be gullible in believing everything we're told.

So what is the answer, especially in a world where fewer and fewer

people trust, fewer and fewer sources of information about the most basic challenges that we

face, like pandemics and climate chaos and democracy itself. One place to start is by listening

to all sides, but not giving equal cretance, by respecting

the consensus, but not pillorying the dissidents, by refusing to talk down to the irrational

and by calmly finding a common ground of reason and compassion with each other.

So this is a podcast about not glossing over disagreement, but encouraging it,

in other words, about having conversations that are sensitive and respectful

and common ground-seeking, but sometimes inevitably, constructively, uncomfortable.

Today on the show, a delightful educator of science, Luke O'Neill, Professor Luke O'Neill, Professor of

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