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Just go to give directly.org slash rationally speaking. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and for this episode, I'm talking with Kelsey Piper, who is a journalist writing for Future Perfect, the section of Vox that's devoted to covering the issues that matter the most for global well-being.

I'm a big fan of Kelsey's careful and nuanced approach to thinking in general, and I've had her on the show a couple years ago,

but since then a lot has happened, such as a pandemic, and Kelsey's done a lot of great reporting

on COVID over the last year and a half. I've also enjoyed following her discussions on Twitter,

kind of explaining how she reasons about the evidence on masks or social distancing

or vaccines, etc. So that's the impetus for our conversation. I wanted to get Kelsey's

advice about how to reason about complicated topics using COVID as kind of our test case.

So that's the focus of most of the episode. And then in the last

15, 20 minutes, we talk about another piece Kelsey worked on recently that was interesting and

controversial about the degrowth movement. And before we get started, I just wanted to give you a

heads up that a few days after we taped this episode, Kelsey emailed me to say that she had since learned more and updated her opinion of one of the drugs that we discuss in the episode.

That's in the section near the midpoint of the conversation when we're discussing ivermectin.

So I left in the original conversation, but I've added Kelsey's

update at the end of the episode. Here is my conversation with Kelsey Piper.

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