NYC Skeptics ( Is an All-Volunteer, 501(C)3 Nonprofit That Promotes Critical Thinking, Science Education, and Skeptical Inquiry

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NYC Skeptics ( Is an All-Volunteer, 501(C)3 Nonprofit That Promotes Critical Thinking, Science Education, and Skeptical Inquiry

“If you’re thinking of starting a local organization, New York City Skeptics is a fine example of how to do it right.” – James Randi ABOUT NEW YORK CITY SKEPTICS NYC Skeptics (www.nycskeptics.org) is an all-volunteer, 501(c)3 nonprofit that promotes critical thinking, science education, and skeptical inquiry. Our activities and events include the following: • Our Public Lecture Series hosts speakers from the scientific and skeptical worlds including James Randi, John Rennie, Carl Zimmer, Massimo Pigliucci, Michael Shermer, and Richard Wiseman. • We sponsor the annual Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS) (www.necss.org), and NYC Skeptics members receive discount on conference registration. • We sponsor the New York City chapters of Drinking Skeptically, an annual Darwin Day Celebration, and SkeptiCampNYC. • We produce the Rationally Speaking podcast (www.rationallyspeakingpodcast.org) hosted by Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef. JOIN NEW YORK CITY SKEPTICS TODAY! Membership is available at the following levels and includes a special thank you gift. Thank you for your support! $35 Student $50 Friend $100 Supporter $250 Associate $500 Gotham Skeptic $1000 Randi Club Other amount _____________________ Payment method: Cash Check Credit card (please circle): Visa MasterCard Discover Amex Credit card # ____________________________________ Exp. date (mm/yy) _______ CSC code_______ Name on card ___________________________________ Signature_______________________________ Billing address_______________________________________________ City_______________________ State __________________ Zip code_______________ E-mail _________________________________ Shipping address (if different) _______________________________________________________________ City ______________________________ State_____________________ Zip code__________________ • Please make checks payable to “New York City Skeptics” and mail to: New York City Skeptics, PO Box 5122 NY, NY 10185. • Please allow 4-6 weeks to process your membership. Your contribution is tax-deductible to the extent allowable by law. .

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Pod of Jake #67 – Julia Galef Ai-Generated Transcript 1
POD OF JAKE #67 – JULIA GALEF AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Jake 00:59 Thank you so much, Julia, for taking the time and joining me on the show today. I really appreciate it and looking forward to this conversation for some time. And I've actually listened to your podcast a bunch in the past. Most recently. Yeah, your episode with metallic. So funny must be funny to be on the other side of the microphone. Yeah. But thank you for coming on, I think the best place to get started would be for those who don't know you to tell your story a little bit. And then we'll spend a lot of time talking about your book, which recently came out. Julia Galef 01:29 Sounds good. Thanks, Jake. Yes, it's good to be on the show. My story. Basically, for the last 10 years, I've just been devoted to this question of how do we improve human reasoning and decision making? And really interest in this question, both from a theoretical level? Like how do we think about what would ideal reasoning look like? Just almost philosophically, and also, just from a practical level? Like, what are the kinds of mistakes that the human brain tends to make and what kinds of situations and getting really into a lot of the cognitive science literature and kind of experimenting on real people like trying out techniques and seeing how well they work and, you know, talking to people about their experiences, noticing their own biases and things like that.
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Volume 15, Number 2 March-April 2021
Volume 15, Number 2 March-April 2021 thereasoner.org ISSN 1757-0522 list. (Those were “Decision Theory without Representa- Contents tion Theorems” in 2014, published in Philosophers’ Imprint, and “Dr. Truthlove or: How I Learned to Stop Worry- Guest Editorial 9 ing and Love Bayesian Probabilities” in 2015, published in Noˆus.) Anyone interested in the social epistemology of math Features 9 should know Kenny’s work too: his “Probabilistic Proofs and Transferability” (Philosophia Mathematica, 2009) and News 14 “Rebutting and Undercutting in Mathematics” (Philosophi- cal Perspectives, 2015) are classics and personal favorites. What’s Hot in . 14 Kenny and I ﬁrst crossed paths Events 15 at a conference in Paris while I Courses and Programmes 15 was a grad student. He joined my dissertation committee a little Jobs and Studentships 16 after that. Fortunately, Kenny is an easy person to keep in touch with: just go to any random phi- losophy conference and there’s a 63% chance he’s there. As you’ll see from our interview, he’s a terri- bly interesting person and a credit Guest Editorial to the profession. I’m happy to of- fer you his opinions on fractal mu- Salutations, reasoners. I’m delighted to be guest editor for this sic, Zoom conferences, being a good referee, teaching in math issue, featuring an interview with the man, the myth, the leg- and philosophy, the rationalist community and its relationship end, Kenny Easwaran. Kenny is a newly-minted Professor of to academia, decision-theoretic pluralism, and the city of Man- Philosophy at Texas A&M University.
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Public Debate on Science Issues Myths of Child Psychology
Superbug Crisis | Ten Tactics for Skepticism | Claims of Chi | Fake Bomb Detectors the Magazine for Science and Reason Vol. 41 No. 1 | January/February 2017 Public Debate on Project Science Greenglow Issues Creationism Myths of in Europe Child Psychology Doubt and American Fears Uncertainty Survey INTRODUCTORY PRICE U.S. and Canada $5.99 Skepticism Is Nonpartisan Published by the Center for Inquiry in association with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Robyn E. Blumner, CEO Massimo Polidoro, Research Fellow Bar ry Karr, Ex ec u tive Di rect or Benjamin Radford, Research Fellow Joe Nickell, Senior Research Fellow Richard Wiseman, Research Fellow www.csicop.org Fellows James E. Al cock*, psy chol o gist, York Univ., Tor on to Mur ray Gell-Mann, pro fes sor of phys ics, San ta Fe In sti tute; Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA Mar cia An gell, MD, former ed i tor-in-chief, No bel lau re ate Lor en Pan kratz, psy chol o gist, Or e gon Health New Eng land Jour nal of Med i cine Thom as Gi lov ich, psy chol o gist, Cor nell Univ. Sci en ces Univ. Kimball Atwood IV, MD, physician; author; Newton, MA David H. Gorski, cancer surgeon and re searcher at Barbara Robert L. Park, professor of physics, Univ. of Maryland Steph en Bar rett, MD, psy chi a trist; au thor; con sum er ad vo cate, Ann Kar manos Cancer Institute and chief of breast surgery Jay M. Pasachoff, Field Memorial Professor of Al len town, PA section, Wayne State University School of Medicine.
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Julia Galef: Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the Podcast Where We Explore the Borderlands Between Reason and Nonsense
Rationally Speaking #181: Will MacAskill on “Moral Uncertainty” Julia Galef: 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 is my good friend and today's guest, Will MacAskill. Will is probably most famous worldwide for helping create and popularize the effective altruism movement, which I've talked about in several past episodes of the podcast. He co-founded and is the CEO of the Center for Effective Altruism, and is the author of the book Doing Good Better. But today we're not going to be talking about effective altruism, at least not primarily. We're going to be talking about Will's work in philosophy. Oh, I didn't mention in my list of Will's achievements that he's also ... When he became a tenured professor of philosophy at Oxford, he was the youngest person in the world to be a tenured professor of philosophy. We're going to be talking about Will's main research focus in philosophy, which is moral uncertainty. This is a topic that's on my list, at least, of philosophical questions that I think are meaningful, and real, and important to actual real-life decision-making -- and that are unresolved, but that I feel like we might potentially be able to make progress on. This is not a long list of topics, but moral uncertainty is on it. Will, welcome to the show. Will MacAskill: Thanks so much for having me on. Julia Galef: I can't believe I haven't had you on sooner.
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CFI Calls on FDA to Label Homeopathic Drugs As Untested and Unproven
[ NEWS AND COMMENT CFI Calls on FDA to Label Homeopathic Drugs as Untested and Unproven Consumers spend $3 billion a year on homeopathic drugs, yet most remain unaware that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not evalu- ated them for safety and effectiveness. In comments filed with the FDA the week of August 17, the Center for Inquiry (CFI) urged the FDA to sub- ject homeopathic drugs to the same testing requirements as conventional drugs. Failing that, CFI urged the FDA to at least require homeopathic prod- ucts to be clearly labeled as untested and unproven. Homeopathy is a centuries-old pseudoscience, developed before the discovery of disease-causing pathogens, based on the false beliefs that “like cures like” and that the more an ingredient is diluted the more potent it is, due to water’s “memory” of the diluted ingre- for not distinguishing between effec- tive remedies and pseudoscience Homeopathy is a centuries-old dient. As CFI stated in its comments, from the 1700s if both products “By its own definition, homeopathy share the same store shelves, and pseudoscience, developed cannot work.” Yet for historical reasons there is no labeling on homeopathic relating to the passage of the original drugs to indicate they are given a before the discovery of Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 1938 pass by the FDA. Clear labeling on disease-causing pathogens. (which had a homeopathic practitioner homeopathic products, that catches consumers’ attention and informs as a key sponsor), homeopathic prod- them that the FDA does not evalu- can result in people becoming sicker or ucts can be marketed even though they ate these products for safety or effec- even dying for lack of real, scientifically are not subject to the rigorous testing tiveness, is an easy way to ensure that for safety and effectiveness that conven- people looking to treat their illnesses proven treatments.
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Singularity Summit 2011 Workshop Report
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Changing Minds with Style∗
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How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup Group
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In Silicon Valley by Sam Frank
Cockburn and Gray: u Exhuming u Daniel Mendelsohn: A New Cold War? Pablo Neruda Down on Downton HARPER’S MAGAZINE/JANUARY 2015 $6.99 POWER AND PARANOIA IN SILICON VALLEY BY SAM FRANK u LOVE CRIMES What Liberation Looks Like for Afghan Women BY JEN PERCY THE PROBLEM OF PAIN MANAGEMENT The Makers of OxyContin Play Dirty BY JOnaH CamPBELL anD SIMON LIEM REPORT COME WITH US IF YOU WANT TO LIVE Among the apocalyptic libertarians of Silicon Valley By Sam Frank ust by a quick show user input; in Neal Ste- “ofJ hands, has anyone phenson’s science-fiction heard of a D.A.O. or an novel Snow Crash, hu- agent before?” asked mans interact with one Jonathan Mohan. He another and with intel- was in his mid-twenties ligent agents within and wore a beige the more-than-virtual- Bitcoin T-shirt. As if to reality Metaverse. scratch my head, I half- “Imagine if you wrote way raised my right some program that arm. A dozen others could render a service, raced up past mine. and it generated enough Forty or fifty of us of a profit that it could were in a glass-walled cover its own costs. It coworking space at could perpetuate indefi- 23rd Street and Park nitely . because it’s just Avenue in Manhattan, the code running itself.” at a Meetup for a tech- “How much Skynet nology called Ethere- risk is there?” a young um. Invented by a man asked Mohan, us- nineteen-year-old Rus- ing sci-fi shorthand: sian Canadian named Could a few lines of Vitalik Buterin, and open-source code, still unreleased and un- meant to augment hu- der development on the man autonomy by obvi- day of the Meetup, in ating opaque institu- February 2014, Ethere- tions like Goldman um is intended to decentralize control “Effectively, what a D.A.O.
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Julia Galef: Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the Podcast Where We Explore the Borderlands Between Reason and Nonsense
Rationally Speaking #240: David Manheim on “Goodhart’s Law and how metrics fail” Julia Galef: Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Julia Galef, and my guest today is David Manheim. David is a decision theorist with a PhD in public policy from Pardee Rand Graduate School. And one of the topics that David has studied and written a lot about over the years, in blog posts and academic articles alike, is a principle called Goodhart's law. It's in that small set of deceptively simple principles that once you understand it, kind of explains so much of what's wrong with the world. So Goodhart's law, you might have heard it stated as “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” We're going to talk today about what that means, how Goodhart's law shows up and and kind of the dynamics of how it works. So David, welcome to Rationally Speaking. David Manheim: Thanks. I'm excited to be here. Julia Galef: I'm curious how you got interested in Goodhart's law in the first place, and specifically whether it was more like, seeing how consequential this law is to education and healthcare and policy and business and things like that, in the real world? Versus the kind of mathematician’s, “Wow, what an intellectually interesting set of dynamics for me to puzzle over”? David Manheim: So it's interesting. It was kind of a weird path.
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Progress Report
PROGRESS 2016 REPORT Message from the President and CEO This aptly named Progress Report gives you a sense of the Cen- CFI’s efforts to stand up for secular people here and abroad were ter for Inquiry’s incredible ambition and range of endeavors to particularly active in 2016. As a multi-year project, we have been promote reason and science. From our two flagship magazines, Free challenging the exclusion of secular celebrants from those who Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer, to our work defending secular activists may solemnize marriages. In too many states, religious leaders are around the world at the United Nations Human Rights Council, automatically given the right to solemnize marriages alongside cer- CFI is working to bring the values of the Enlightenment—critical tain public officials, while secular celebrants are excluded. In 2014 thinking, scientific literacy, humanism, and individual freedom—to we won a lawsuit against Indiana’s exclusion, and just at the start the 21st century. of 2017, we heard the good news that an Illinois judge opened the way for secular celebrants there as well. The big news for CFI is that we have formally merged with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science (RDFRS). Another notable CFI victory was the crackdown by the Federal Throughout 2016, the two organizations worked hand-in-glove. Trade Commission on the marketing of homeopathy, something Now, we are one, with RDFRS becoming a division of CFI, CFI had urged in formal testimony. Hopefully this will put a dent and the RDFRS board, including Richard Dawkins, joining the in the $3 billion a year that Americans spend on this consumer CFI board.
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Intellectual Honesty, Cryptocurrency, & More (Vitalik Buterin) Julia Galef
#253: Intellectual honesty, cryptocurrency, & more (Vitalik Buterin) Julia Galef: Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I’m your host, Julia Galef, and today’s guest is Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, an open source blockchain platform, and its corresponding currency Ether, which is the second biggest cryptocurrency in the world after Bitcoin. Vitalik came up with Ethereum eight years ago, when he was 19, and the year before that he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine, the oldest publication devoted to cryptocurrencies. But the reason I started following Vitalik a few years ago, and reading his blog is because he’s also a really sharp and insightful thinker about politics, economics, rationality, how to improve the world. And even though I’m not that into crypto myself, I came to really enjoy reading Vitalik’s public communications as a leader of Ethereum because – as we talk about in our conversation – I find his leadership style refreshingly nuanced and intellectually honest. So that is one of a wide range of things we talk about in this episode and I hope you enjoy it! Here is my conversation with Vitalik Buterin. [musical interlude] Julia Galef: Well, Vitalik, let's start by talking about your most recent blog post, which is about something I've been personally very interested in recently. That is: Why prediction markets seemed kind of disappointingly irrational in predicting the results of the last election. Could you just summarize what the irrational behavior was? What is the mystery in need of an explanation here? Vitalik Buterin: Sure.
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