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The Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman.

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Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman.

My guest today is Andy Norman.

Andy is a philosopher.

He's the director of the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University.

And he's the founder of Searcy, the Cognitive Immunology Center.

In this episode, we discuss his new book, Mental Immunity, Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the search for a better way to think.

We talk about how bad ideas operate like parasites. We talk about the notion of a mental immune

system. We talk about the virtues and dangers of being open-minded. We discuss Richard Dawkins' notion

of selfish genes and his coinage of the word meme.

We talk about conspiracy theories.

We talk about whether you should seek out disagreements with your friends and family or whether you should simply keep the peace.

We talk about policies like stop and frisk and how to weigh live saved against more abstract moral gains.

We talk about what makes good ideas good and bad ideas bad.

We talk about the Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment.

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