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 me today we have two guests, Tom Griffiths and Brian Christian.

Tom is a returning guest to Rationally Speaking.

He joined us a few months ago to talk about whether the brain is secretly rational.

And when he's not appearing on Rationally speaking, you can find him being a professor of psychology and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, where he also directs the computational cognitive science lab.

Brian is an author who writes about computer science, cognitive science, and other related topics for publications

like The Atlantic and Wired and the New Yorker. And he's also the author of the best-selling book,

The Most Human Human, which is pretty cool and you should check out as well. But most recently,

Tom and Brian have jointly published a book called Algorithms to Live By. It's about some of the most

crucial integral algorithms that are used in computer science and how those algorithms actually

apply or can be applied to improve our human decision making in our everyday life. So

decisions like, how should I plan my day or should I quit my job,

that kind of thing. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Brian, welcome to the show and

Tom, welcome back. Thanks so much. Thank you. So this topic is something I've been thinking about

for years. And in fact, I just gave an interview a few months

ago to Vice Magazine, in which I talked about a lot of similar material, actually, although I

hadn't read your book at that point. But I was talking about how algorithms like Bayes Rule or

understanding the tradeoff between exploring and exploiting can help guide our decision-making and improve it.

And I thought I was being so nuanced and intelligent.

And then the article came out and the headline was something like,

...