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Very Bad Wizards

Episode 225: Forbidden Modules

Very Bad Wizards

Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro

Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.83K Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2021

⏱️ 102 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

David and Tamler talk about the often rancorous debate among cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists over whether the mind is modular -- composed of discrete systems responsible for vision, reasoning, cheater detection, sexual jealousy, and so on. David and Tamler (mostly David) describe the history of the debate, then dive into a recent paper (Pietraszewski & Wertz, 2021) arguing that virtually all the disagreement is the product of a conceptual and methodological confusion – that the two sides are operating with different levels of analysis and talking past each other as a result.

Plus, we REALLY tried not to talk about the University of Austin thing for the whole opening segment. We had another topic lined up and everything. It just didn’t work out. Cicero would understand. Bari Weiss stans might wanna skip to the main segment.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Very bad wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and a psychologist, Dave Pizarro,

0:05.9

having an informal discussion about issues and signs and ethics.

0:09.4

Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm out of allow to say,

0:13.6

and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

0:17.0

Oh, I just wish I understood why. Why I should care.

0:21.8

The lady on his phone, a new attention to that man behind the curtain.

0:38.8

Who are you? Who are you? I'm very bad man.

0:43.6

I'm a very good man. Good man. They think he's lost and with no more brains than you have.

0:53.6

They know our attention. Come on man. Anybody can have a brain.

1:02.7

You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard.

1:10.5

Welcome to very bad wizards. I'm Tamler Somers from the University of Houston.

1:14.6

Dave, we said we weren't going to talk about the whole University of Austin thing,

1:20.4

but I mean, you've got to be fucking kidding, right?

1:24.3

Where's your self-control, man? Where's your self-control?

1:27.5

I've had it off as long as I could. I'll give you this break.

1:30.7

So yeah, I didn't want to talk about it because I feel we can talk about why later,

1:34.5

but really, what I don't want to be is part of the problem.

1:36.8

But here's where I'll give you a pass. It's in Texas and I feel like you guys should have a little

1:41.2

bit of pride about somebody just setting up fake shop in your backyard.

1:46.0

I mean, we had like, we have a lot of that, you know, like we Elon Musk, you know.

1:52.1

So we're used to that and we're not that proud lately of like our state legislature and

1:58.9

what their priorities are. So yeah.

...

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