Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and

nonsense. I'm your host, Julia Galef, and with us today is our guest, Professor Scott Aronson.

Scott is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. He blogs at Stettel Optimized, and he's also the author of the book,

Quantum Computing Since Democritus, which our listeners might recognize because a recent

rationally speaking guest physicist Sean Carroll named it as his pick of the episode and

called it this generation's Goetal Asherbach, which I think is the

best introduction a guest could possibly get on rationally speaking. So Scott, welcome to the show.

Okay, well, Sean was too kind, but thank you so much, Julia. I'm a big fan of your work,

so it's an honor to be on your podcast. Wonderful. So let me, let's tell our listeners what we're going to talk about today.

Recently, Scott was in Berkeley and he visited the summer program on applied rationality

and cognition, or Spark, for short, which is a summer program for gifted high school math

students that my organization runs.

And Scott gave a guest lecture,

which is also posted on his blog, so you can read the transcript there. And the topic of the lecture

was basically rational disagreement. So what should it look like when two rational people

have a disagreement and share their opinions and discuss.

For example, should we expect their opinions to converge by the end of the conversation?

So does being rational and do the rules of rationality allow for disagreements to persist,

basically? So that's my brief introduction to the topic.

And Scott, I'll turn the floor over to you.

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