🔍 Key insights

• Ask “Why?” Before You Push Back — When someone makes a claim, the instinct is to attack the conclusion immediately. But the right first move is to ask for the premises. You cannot meaningfully challenge an argument you don’t yet understand.

• Clarity Is Not Pedantry — Before evaluating any argument, clarifying language is essential. “We should raise taxes” contains at least four ambiguous terms. Skipping this step means you’re arguing against a version of the claim that was never made — that’s a straw man, and it gets you nowhere.

• Valid Is Not the Same as True — An argument can be perfectly valid (the conclusion follows logically from the premises) while being completely false (because the premises are wrong). Sound arguments require both. This distinction is one of the most underused tools in everyday reasoning.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• “Fallacies: Formal and Informal Fallacies” by Wireless Philosophy – A clear, accessible breakdown of common errors in reasoning

• “Hume’s Is-Ought Problem” by Philosophy Vibe – A focused explanation of the Is-Ought fallacy introduced in the video

📖 Further reading:

• “Being Logical” by D.Q. McInerny — A practical guide to the principles of logic covered in this episode. It is the clearest introduction to argument structure I have come across for a general audience.

• “A Rulebook for Arguments” by Anthony Weston — A compact handbook that mirrors exactly what this video covers: how to construct and evaluate arguments step by step.

🎧 Podcast to listen to:

• “Critical Reasoning for Beginners” by Marianne Talbot (Oxford University) – A free 6-part lecture series covering exactly the tools in this video: argument identification, premises, validity, soundness, and fallacies.

💡 Think for Yourself

• When was the last time you changed your mind during an argument — and was it because of a premise being shown false, or because of social pressure?

• Think of a belief you hold strongly. Can you state its premises clearly? And if someone attacked one of those premises, would you know how to respond?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Imagine two people debating whether a city should build a new hospital. One argues from cost, the other from lives saved. They talk for an hour and neither convinces the other. Now imagine they pause and each writes down their premises. Suddenly they realise they share three of them and only disagree on one. The entire argument collapses into a single, precise question. How many of your disagreements are actually that small?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• Thinking for Yourself Is a Means, Not an End — Our goal as epistemic agents is to believe truths and avoid falsehoods. If deferring to someone better positioned gets us closer to that goal, then insisting on doing it ourself isn’t intellectual virtue.

• Expertise Is an Epistemic Position, Not a Club — Matheson doesn’t define experts by their credentials. An expert is simply someone more likely to get the right answer than you: more evidence, better tools for evaluating it, more time on the question. This means expertise is a spectrum, not a membership. And it also means that on almost every question you care about, someone out there is better positioned to answer it than you are.

• The Experts’ Consensus Test — When experts agree, align with them. When experts deeply and widely disagree, suspend judgment. This applies to quantum mechanics, immigration policy, and the existence of God alike. The uncomfortable implication is that most of us are walking around with unjustified beliefs on the most important questions — not because we’re irrational, but because we haven’t absorbed what the suspension of judgment actually requires.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• Why you think you’re right — even if you’re wrong by Julia Galef (TED Talk) — Galef’s most watched talk, exploring why we defend beliefs instead of seeking truth. Directly relevant to the episode’s core tension.

• The Epistemic Regress Problem by Wireless Philosophy (Wi-Phi) — A short, clear video on why justifying beliefs is harder than it looks, and what that means for how we form them.

📖 Further reading:

• Why It’s OK Not To Think For Yourself by Jonathan Matheson — the book we discuss in the interview.

• A Philosopher’s Guide to Epistemology by Jonathan Matheson and Rico Vitz — Matheson’s own introductory text. If this episode sparked something, this is the natural next step into the broader epistemological questions underneath it.

💡 Think for Yourself

• On which topics in your life are you thinking for yourself — and do you actually have the epistemic position to justify it? Or are you just attached to the conclusion?

• If deferring to experts is rational, what does that mean for the beliefs you formed before you ever encountered the evidence — your political views, your religious position, your sense of what a good life looks like?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Imagine you are about to form a belief on a question you care deeply about — free will, the existence of God, the right immigration policy. Now imagine you are told that ten thousand people have spent their careers on this exact question and still cannot agree. You have an afternoon and access to Google or your favorite AI tool. Ask yourself honestly: what are the odds that your afternoon changes the epistemic situation? And if it doesn’t — what is the belief you are about to form actually based on?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• Truth Is Worth Pursuing Only If It’s Worth Knowing — Miles makes a disarming argument: if absurdism were the ultimate truth — that existence is fundamentally without meaning or value — the rational move would be to take the blue pill and erase that knowledge entirely. The pursuit of truth is not unconditional. It is conditional on what we expect to find on the other side.

• All Arguments Bottom Out in Seemings — Every philosophical argument, however rigorous, ultimately rests on something that simply seems right. Logic, mathematics, perception — all of it traces back to intellectual intuitions that cannot themselves be further justified. This doesn’t make knowledge fragile. It makes the foundation honest.

• Philosophy Gives You Fog With Better Eyes — Ten years of serious philosophy has left Miles holding fewer firm convictions and far more agnosticism than when he started. He knows less than he thought he did. And yet his thinking is clearer than it has ever been. You lose certainty. You gain navigation. Those are not the same thing, and philosophy hands you one by taking away the other.

📚 Go deeper

🎧 Podcast to listen to:

• Miles K. Donahue – The Uncertainty Podcast — Miles’ own channel, where he does exactly what he describes in this interview: rigorous, uncertain, honest philosophical investigation.

📖 Further reading:

• Atheism and the Problem of Evil – Paul Draper — The book Miles cites as the one that would most challenge his theism. A careful, philosophically serious treatment of the argument from evil.

• The Problem of Evil – Peter van Inwagen — A theist philosopher’s sustained defence against the argument that suffering is evidence against God. The other side of the same conversation.

💡 Think for Yourself

• If you discovered that the deepest truth about existence was that none of it matters — would you want to know?

• What belief do you hold with the most conviction? Is that conviction grounded in the arguments for it, or in something else? Would it survive the arguments failing?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Miles started this conversation having moved from a conservative Christian worldview he held with high certainty to agnosticism about almost everything. Some call it progress, while others loss. Sit with that for a moment: is it better to be confidently wrong, or uncertainly right? And which one are you currently choosing?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• The Convenient Way Is the Wrong Way — Michael Gerlich’s core argument is deceptively simple: the most natural way to use AI — ask first, think later — is the most damaging one. Convenience is the trap, not the tool.

• Cognitive Offloading vs. Cognitive Outsourcing — Storing phone numbers in your phone is fine. Letting AI structure your thinking before you have formed a thought is something else entirely. The distinction matters more than most people realise.

• Think First, Prompt Later — Gerlich’s research suggests that the order matters: forming your own view before consulting AI leads to meaningfully better reasoning than offloading from the start. The inconvenient way is the right way.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• Yuval Noah Harari – “Will the Future Be Human?” (WEF Davos) – Harari on AI, free will, and what happens when algorithms know us better than we know ourselves.

• Advait Sarkar – “How to Stop AI from Killing Your Critical Thinking” (TED, 2025) — A Microsoft researcher makes the case that AI doesn’t just answer our questions — it quietly replaces the thinking that answering them was supposed to build.

📖 Further reading:

• The Convenience Trap by Michael Gerlich – The book behind the episode. Argues that AI’s greatest risk is not its power but its frictionlessness.

• Co-Intelligence – Ethan Mollick – A practical and honest guide to working alongside AI without surrendering your thinking to it.

🎧 Podcast to listen to:

• If Anybody Builds It, EVERYONE Dies — Within Reason — Alex O’Connor discusses the risk of developing AGI with AI expert Nate Soares.

💡 Think for Yourself

• When was the last time you sat with a difficult question long enough to feel genuinely stuck? Or did AI smooth that over before you got there?

• If AI always tells you what you want to hear, how would you ever find out you were wrong?

☁️ Thought Experiment

AI asked to improve a candle will make a brighter, cheaper, longer-lasting candle. It will never invent the lightbulb. Think about your last important project. Were you improving a candle?

Cheers,
Kevin

Dostoyevsky warned us of those dangers through some of his characters more than a century ago. He has been part of the turn to psychology in literature, inspiring thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Nietzsche to investigate further the complexities of our minds. In this essay, I review 5 of Dostoyevsky’s characters and how reason — our only tool to make sense of the world — turned against them.

Minor spoilers alert: the information I provide on the characters are minor spoilers which take place at the beginning of the novels, but some of my interpretation of the stories might remove some of the magic of discovering themes for yourself during the reading of the book. I ensured that those micro-spoilers are contained in their own section, so you can simply skip the ones you haven’t read yet to avoid any inconvenience.

Crime and Punishment: Raskolnikov

Raskolnikov is a dropout student who feels pressured to succeed in life. This weight is imposed on him by the expectations of his family, their sacrificing themselves in order for him to go to university, and — indirectly — their hope of getting his financial support in the future. He lives in St. Petersburg, far away from his native town in the countryside, and is surrounded by the city life — violence, drunkenness, modern wilderness. Slowly, he isolates himself from his peers and neighbors, and spends his days reflecting in his dark, claustrophobic room. Raskolnikov is intelligent, and he starts spinning ideas through his mind, like a spider spreading his web around itself — building a defense that, paradoxically, seals off all possible avenues of escape.

Even though the expectations of others are weighty, his own are crushing. His ambition is to be an extraordinary man — a Napoleon, one who takes what he wants, flying over morals and laws. As time goes by, his abstract idea takes form to the point of becoming logical and justified. Indeed, an extraordinary man benefits society. Who is responsible for the progress of our civilization: the ignorant drunkard or the genius? What is the value of the life of the lowest kind? Motivated by utilitarian ideas (what is good is what maximizes the utility — or overall ‘pleasure’ — of society as a whole rather than the individual), Raskolnikov comes up with the plan to murder Alyona Ivanovna, a pawnbroker despised by most, and use the loot for the benefit of society; while simultaneously confirming his status of extraordinary man — murder as a litmus test.

Notes from Underground: Protagonist

The protagonist of this novel is a spiteful man who lives isolated from society and basks in his own thoughts. His experience with others has developed in him a hate of humanity, and he is torn between this feeling and a social need of others that he cannot shake away. At the beginning of the novel, we discover the man through his notebook, where he addresses a non-existent audience and yet feels the need to justify his opinions. Similarly to Raskolnikov, he has absorbed contemporary ideas and sat in his room running a dialectic with himself.

More than a decade passes between the writing of the notes and the events counted in the second part of the book, yet nothing has changed. Most probably, the characters who participated in those events have long forgotten about it; they carried on with their lives without looking back. But the man is still in his room, considering every detail, reliving in shame his behavior as if it was only yesterday. Tellingly, he recalls the story of being moved away by someone in a bar, calmly yet without even considering him. For days, the man eats himself away, wondering how he missed the opportunity to complain about it, to revolt and fight for his own dignity. He is ashamed of the cowardly way he acted, and promises himself to stand up for himself at the next opportunity. Worse than this, he actually tracks his target, finds out where he lives, observes him to understand his routine and — finally — comes up with the plan of refraining from moving away from his path the next time they cross. For days on, he throws himself in the direction of the other, building his mental strength to avoid swerving away. But he can’t. Each time, his instinct takes over and forces him to avoid the collision. After trying forever, he finally gives up, and involuntarily runs into him. But the ‘victim’ is deep in thought and fails to grasp the situation, continuing his walk as if nothing happened.

The Double: Mr. Golyadkin

Mr. Golyadkin is a minor civil servant part of the Russian imperial bureaucracy doing routine administrative work. One of his most visible traits is his obsession with social status: appearances and ‘busyness’ (in its literal meaning) is all that matters. Clearly, he wished that his situation was better than it is. In his free time, he negotiates the price of furniture he doesn’t have the means to buy in the hope that others will perceive him as a rich and lavish person. Similarly, he exchanges his large bills for smaller ones so that his wallet feels and looks bigger in his pocket.

Unfortunately, others are not duped and see his performance for what it is. Junior employees mock him, his own servant has nothing but contempt for him and colleagues fail to acknowledge his presence. Like many Dostoyevskian characters, he turns to his own mind: he creates a story and sets himself against the others; contrary to them, he doesn’t wear a mask, he says things as they are, he is honest. Interestingly, those fictions constantly underline a recurring theme: he wants to be the savior and to finally be recognized as the hero he has always been. He fantasizes about how he would save the day if the chandelier would fall to the ground during a ball, and how he would sweep away the woman threatened to be crushed and save her life. Again, he is the drop of morality and heroism in a sea of corruption. As the story progresses, his mental load becomes heavier. When the opportunity presents itself, he decides to open up and share his private thoughts with someone special: a man who ran into him in the street and surprisingly resembles him — his double.

Another Man’s Wife and a Husband Under the Bed: Ivan Andreevich

Ivan Andreevich is a married man convinced that his wife is being unfaithful. Even though he doesn’t have the slightest evidence for it, he becomes overcome by jealousy and pictures how his wife might betray him. His reflections spiral out of control and motivate him to spy on her, putting himself in situations where he must explain to others his behavior and forcing him to confront his own shame and mania. Instead of being led to the confirmation of his presuppositions, he finds himself in farcical and humiliating situations, and ends up hiding from the husband of another woman by lying under their bed.

White Nights: Protagonist

The protagonist of White Nights is a lonely man who turns to his imagination as a way to escape his reality. Being too shy to strike a conversation with others, he paints them as novelistic characters and comes up with what their stories must be like. He develops one-way relations with them, expecting to run into them at some time and place of the day, participating in their routine unbeknownst to them. As the creative director of his own life, he goes as far as befriending houses and striking up conversations with them. All events captured by his attention are transformed into a romance, until he cannot escape it anymore. His capacity to focus on the real drifts away and his escapism turns into a prison. He himself gives up on the hope of experiencing the raw content of the world and exchanges it for an abstract idea.

Is Reason Doomed?

Thinking is extremely useful, but it can turn against itself like a snake biting his own tail if we allow it. Reason, thought and fiction should be a support to our life rather than a substitution. Too often, we get stuck in ruminating the past or fantasizing about how our life will turn around thanks to an event which will show everyone that we were actually an undercover hero all along — just like Mr. Golyadkin. Or similarly to the Man from the Notes, we might spend years resenting someone for something they did not even know about — they might even be unaware of our existence.

Those fictitious stories are attractive, they are mental black holes which can swallow us entirely if we get too close to them. But life is not a novel or a cliché movie — it is the fundamental substance they are built upon. The risk is that certain stories we come up with isolate us from the world. They can create divisions: we might feel superior to others, or associate ourselves to a group identity and resent ‘them’. Without even realizing it, our thinking becomes repetitive and unidirectional. We pound on all problems with the same old hammer, we uncritically assign the cause of all our pains to the same entity. Our reasoning, which used to be so versatile and colorful, becomes monotonic and boring. Most of our time is spent in our heads, looking at the past for excuses and at the future in spite.

Dostoyevsky reminds us about the risk of creating our own echo chambers. To break them, we must start by avoiding isolating ourselves: we must seek companionship, meet people with fundamentally opposed views and backgrounds, teach our ego to stop clinging to our opinions and hear those of others. Failing this, we are bound to become a caricature of a novelist from the 19th century — a mere fiction.

And they are not alone: Professor Elise Crull (whom I interviewed recently) asked Neil deGrasse Tyson why he was so averse to philosophy during her interview on StarTalk. For him, philosophers of science have not been able to have an impact on the field for decades. In short, science should be left to scientists.

So how come Neil deGrasse Tyson, my friends and acquaintances — all very smart people — converge in their critique of philosophy, while I invest much of my free time and energy on studying it? Should I reconsider my choice and turn to something more useful, more potent? I don’t think so, and here is why.

Even though all object to philosophy, they do so on different grounds. Let’s review each one separately and see why they fail.

‘Anything goes in philosophy’

As is often the case, some disagreement arises due to an ambiguity of language, an imprecise definition. Some readers will probably roll their eyes at this point — isn’t that a classical philosopher’s move to nitpick on definitions? — but allow me to elaborate first.

What do we mean by ‘philosophy’? Can’t the word be used as ‘it is my philosophy to be kind to people’ just as fairly as ‘philosophy is the search for truth’, while the sentences’ meaning differs strongly? In the same way, I can refer to either a financial institution or the extremities of a river when I say ‘I’ll go to the bank tomorrow’. Those ambiguities of language creep up constantly, and undermine our discussions.

So before judging philosophy, we should first agree on the terms: is philosophy simply a subjective perspective we hold on the way we conduct our life, or is it a rational reflection and debate to understand better a certain topic? In my and probably most cases, it is the latter. The gap between the two couldn’t be wider.

On one side, anything goes: if your philosophy is that money brings happiness, and mine that it doesn’t — we disagree, end of the story. On the other: we build the strongest arguments possible to justify one of our beliefs and expose them to others’ ruthless rounds of objection. After the storm, we look at what remains. On the former, we simply state preferences; on the latter, we find out what can be agreed on through a dialectical process.

Our preferences are dogmatic, philosophy is falsifiable.

‘Philosophy is useless — a waste of time’

This is one of the most frequent objection to philosophy: ‘it simply doesn’t cook rice’, ‘it doesn’t bring anything’. Why should we invest so much time in something without value? I would agree with the conclusion, if only the premises were true. But they aren’t.

The perceived strength of this argument is deeply worrying: nowadays, a valuable thing must have monetary value. If we can’t find a buyer in a market, then whatever we are trying to sell is useless. Meta has value, Netflix too. Many people want their services, how can it not be what ‘being valuable’ means? But this is an extremely limited understanding of the concept.

The argument — perceived as a slam dunk on the philosopher — rests on the assumption that value is money: physical bills, zeros on bank accounts, valuation in the NASDAQ, your willingness to pay to get something. But what about everything that is valuable to humans, abstracted from market forces? Love, friendship, arts, intellectual pursuit, emotions: aren’t those valuable, even much more necessary to a fulfilling life than acquiring the last smartphone? If we agree on this — and I really hope we do —, then why can’t philosophy be valuable even if it has no monetary end goal*?

The upshot is that the concept of value is much broader than assumed in the argument, and that not everything has to increase its stock price to justify its existence.

*To be clear, philosophy has monetary value as well in my opinion — as studying it makes us better decision-makers and critical thinkers —, but even assuming that it hasn’t any fails to support the conclusion.

‘Philosophy is gibberish and nonsense’

Let’s imagine that teleportation for space travels becomes a common thing, and that you decide to go on an Easter holiday to a faraway galaxy with your family. After teleporting, you end up on planet Uddas Battor, renowned for their types of space beers and Grakx hunting spots. Upon arrival, you face a challenge: the Battorians speak battorish, and you cannot make sense of it. However strong you focus on each syllable they utter, this all sounds incoherent to you. What would you conclude? Probably that they simply speak a different language, with different terms and concepts, and that you are not able to understand them.

In the same way, if you pick up a philosophical book or try to engage in a philosophical discussion, you would struggle to make head or tail of the debate. Of course, philosophy is not a different language entirely — most of the terms used are identical to the ones you use daily —, but they might differ from their usual meaning. Often, knowledge of the history of ideas and their debates is required to understand why philosophers focus on seemingly superfluous details.

For instance, it sounds strange that many philosophers accept the existence of a realm outside of time and space populated by the Forms of beauty, justice and numbers. And maybe it is absolutely false. But still, they are not endorsing it to feel special — they consider that this is the most convincing solution to philosophical problems such as ‘if numbers exist, what are we referring to when we use them?’. The alternative is to say that numbers don’t exist, which is a high price to pay for some*.

Similarly to the Battorians: the fact that philosophers understand each other indicates that they are communicating some kind of coherent information. Failing to understand it doesn’t show that it is nonsense, but only that the listener doesn’t get it.

*There are many alternatives to Platonism about numbers — though probably not the ones you have in mind. I am simply using this solution as an example and a primer for deeper thoughts.

‘We should turn to science which is evidence based’

Do electrons exist? What about unicorns? How do we ‘know’ that one exists, but not the other? Maybe we can say that electrons exist because we can set up experiments to find electrons, but we haven’t seen any unicorns yet. The problem is that we haven’t seen electrons either, because they are far too small to interact with visible light. What we actually did — many, many times — is see the effects that some kind of entity causes in certain conditions. We called those entities ‘electrons’ and have a coherent overall system (which includes them) to explain how physics works.

So electrons exist, right? Well, yes and no. We posit electrons in some ways arbitrarily — as causes from the effects we perceive. But alternative causes could also explain those effects, and maybe we will find out that they are in the future. Not long ago, we accepted that ether acted as a medium to support the travel of light through space. Nowadays, we don’t believe that ether exists, because new theories have turned out to predict the phenomena we observe better — making ether redundant. In short, one possible position when it comes to existence is to say: ‘whatever our current best scientific theories posit exists’.

The mind-bending consequence of this view is that ghosts — and anything else really — might exist. Their status as existing entity is just pending on a new, better scientific theory. Here is another challenge faced by supporters of this view: it is unclear which science we should consider when making ontological claims. Do markets exist, as economics state? What about depression, as psychology does? Or should everything be reduced to physics — where only basic atoms and fields, rather than say tables, exist? One of philosophy’s aim is to identify those challenges and think through their consequences.

Science and philosophy are not rivals. They are, and have always been, entangled.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, listen or watch my interview with Prof. Elise Crull.

‘We have a moral duty to do something else’

Some might say that — in our times of uncertainty and existential threats — we have an obligation to invest our time and efforts into doing something more impactful than discussing philosophy, such as becoming a software engineer and supporting the push to reaching AGI as fast as possible (or is that rather the existential threat itself?).

This is a paradoxical argument, since it invokes philosophy against itself. But we can learn from this: maybe it is true, maybe we should do X rather than Y right now. But how would we know about it? Can a scientific experiment settle the matter? Can AI explain to us what duty is? Those are… philosophical questions! And their reason for being is that the most fundamental challenges we face are not wholly empirical, but only empirically informed.

Let’s consider climate change (which at first sight looks like a simple empirical challenge): is the climate warming? How fast? Are humans contributing to this? For all of those questions, we should turn to the sciences. But other — more fundamental — questions arise: what should we do about it? Is sacrificing liberties justified to counter it? Should we enable AI to make practical decisions on our behalf?

Philosophy’s importance only increases the closer we get to chaos, because it forces us to turn from ‘what is’ to ‘what should we do?’.

‘Philosophy doesn’t interest me’

Just as I argued that we have no duty to stop doing philosophy, I am happy to concede that we have no duty to practice it either. If you don’t see the point or don’t have time, then don’t do it.

That being said, I am convinced that everyone is an undercover philosopher: we all wonder about the meaning of life, the existence or non-existence of God, justice, what we owe each other. Of course, this doesn’t mean that reading academic papers on those topics will be fun — but accessible content is now widely available through podcasts, videos, and introductory books to satisfy our curiosity.

Have you ever, as a child, asked the most random — yet profound — questions and received a flat ‘this is just how it is’ or ‘enough with your questions’ from your caregivers? If so, know that those were great questions, and that you are now old enough to explore them on your own.

🔍 Key insights

• Fiction as Cognitive Training – Reading novels isn’t passive entertainment; it’s an active exercise in perspective-taking. Inhabiting characters’ minds reduces the defensive filtering we apply to direct arguments.

• More Content Than Ink – Unlike nonfiction, fiction carries no explicit thesis. Its meaning emerges slowly, through unconscious processing — ideas surface days, weeks, even years after reading.

• Great Books Grow With You – Rereading a novel at different life stages isn’t repetition; it’s a new experience. What you missed at 15 reveals itself at 35, shaped by everything you’ve lived in between..

📚 Go deeper

📖 Further reading:

• How Fiction Works – James Wood – A literary critic’s anatomy of the novel: what makes a character feel real, what a telling detail actually does, and why realism is more complicated than it seems.

• Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky – A confrontation with the darker, contradictory corners of human psychology.

• Frankenstein – Mary Shelley – A story about creation, responsibility, and suffering that speaks directly to modern debates on AI and ethics.

🎧 Podcast to listen to:

• Anyone Can Enjoy the Classics: Here’s How – A Mug of Insights (Robin Waldun) – An episode tackling why classic literature feels intimidating and how to develop the reading skills to actually appreciate and fall in love with it.

💡 Think for Yourself

• If you’ve only ever read nonfiction, what perspectives are you structurally unable to access?

• When a fictional character unsettles you, what does that discomfort reveal about yourself?

☁️ Thought Experiment

You meet someone who has read a thousand books but never left their hometown, and someone who has travelled the world but never read a novel. Who understands humanity better?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• Science as Structured “Why” – Elise Crull argues that science isn’t just prediction or data collection; it’s the disciplined search for deeper explanations. Philosophers help clarify which “why” questions actually drive discovery.

• What Counts as Real Changes – From Isaac Newton’s solid matter to Albert Einstein’s curved spacetime and modern quantum fields, the “stuff” of reality keeps shifting. Ontology evolves with theory.

• Objectivity Is Not Simple – Thinkers like Karl Popper and Bas van Fraassen show that science may not march steadily toward Truth, but instead produces bold conjectures or empirically adequate models. Even observation depends on interpretation.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• StarTalk – How Quantum Physics Complicates Objective Truth, with Elise Crull – Elise Crull discusses realism, quantum theory, and the limits of scientific explanation.

• StarTalk – The Philosophy of Physics, with Elise Crull – Elise Crull explores how thought experiments, quantum debates, and Einstein’s worldview reveal the philosophical foundations of modern physics.

📖 Further reading:

• The Scientific Image – Bas van Fraassen – A powerful case for constructive empiricism.

• Conjectures and Refutations – Karl Popper – Science advances through bold hypotheses and attempted falsification.

💡 Think for Yourself

• If every major theory in history was later revised, why assume our current ones are final?

• Is science discovering reality or constructing increasingly useful descriptions?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Two physicists disagree about whether two distant events happened ‘at the same time’. If relativity says simultaneity depends on perspective, is there a hidden universal clock or does reality itself lack one?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• Magic as Consensual Deception – Jeanette Andrews describes magic as the rare act where we consent to be deceived. It reveals how belief, trust, and scrutiny can coexist in paradox.

• The Ethics of Manipulation – Magic might be a way to experience ethically with deception, offering a model for how influence and intention intersect.

• Perception, Belief & Cognitive Bias – From phenomenology to data visualization, Andrews shows how magicians expose the fragile scaffolding of our perception — the ways our minds “fill in the gaps” of reality.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• Gustav Kuhn – The Neuroscience of Magic – A cognitive scientist explores how magicians exploit the limits of attention and perception.

• Apollo Robbins — The Art of Misdirection – A legendary pickpocket demonstrates how attention works—and how it fails.

• Donald Hoffman – Do We See Reality As It Is? – A cognitive scientist argues that our perceptions evolved to hide reality, not reveal it.

📖 Further reading:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – A foundational book on how our minds are built on shortcuts, illusions, and biases.

• Magic and Showmanship by Henning Nelms – Explores the psychology behind illusion, audience perception, and belief.

🎧 Podcast to listen to:

• Magical Thinking — You Are Not So Smart — The episode explores how our tendency toward “magical thinking” reveals how easily we deceive ourselves and others, and what that means for perception, memory and belief.

💡 Think for Yourself

• When was the last time you knew something was false but still felt it was real (e.g., ghosts)?

• How do you decide when to trust your senses and when to doubt them? Is it reliable?

☁️ Thought Experiment

You and a friend attend the same magic show. Afterward, you describe moments they swear never happened. If your memories disagree, whose version of reality is true?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• Social media as a mirror of human nature – Online anonymity strips away consequences, revealing both our selfish instincts (Hobbes) and our potential for reason and empathy (Rousseau).

• The algorithm as sovereign – YouTube’s algorithm rewards click-through and watch time, pushing creators toward manipulation and sensationalism.

• The burnout trap – Byung-Chul Han’s “achievement subject” explains why creators (myself included) internalize pressure, chasing validation until we exploit ourselves.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• Tristan Harris — “How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day” – A clear primer on how design and incentives hijack attention

• WSJ — “How TikTok’s Algorithm Figures You Out” – A data-driven investigation using bot accounts to reveal how watch time steers the For You page

• Veritasium — “Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective” – Why CTR, titles, and thumbnails dominate outcomes—and what that means for creators and viewers

📖 Further reading:

• Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies – A fascinating dive into what search data reveals about our hidden nature.

• Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society – Essential for understanding how achievement culture ties into platforms like YouTube.

💡 Think for Yourself

• When does persuasion cross the line into manipulation, especially online?

• Are we building communities on social media, or just competing for attention?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Imagine a world where every video you watch is decided by an algorithm that knows your fears and desires better than you do. Would you still call your choices “free,” or is freedom reshaped by what you never even see?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• “Technically sweet” is a dangerous mindset – Once something is possible to build, the urge to create can override ethical restraint, even when the technology carries existential risks.

• Regulation always lags behind innovation – Governments and global institutions almost always react after the fact, leaving humanity exposed to the unintended consequences of breakthroughs.

• We’re accelerating the pace of existential risk – The timeline from discovery to global impact now moves in months, not decades, making it harder for ethics to keep up.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• The Social Dilemma – A deep dive into how tech companies exploit human psychology with unintended social consequences

• Nick Bostrom: The Vulnerable World Hypothesis – Examines how technological progress inevitably creates civilization-ending risks

📖 Further reading:

• Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom – A foundational exploration of the long-term risks posed by advanced AI.

• The Precipice by Toby Ord – An in-depth survey of existential risks facing humanity this century and how we might navigate them.

🎧 Podcast to listen to:

• Future of Life Institute Podcast – Expert discussion on the unintended dangers of cutting-edge innovations

💡 Think for Yourself

• If the creators of dangerous technologies feel more awe than fear, whose role is it to slow them down?

• At what point does innovation stop being progress and start being a gamble with humanity’s survival?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Imagine waking up to read that someone in a basement just built a world-altering AI overnight without any regulation and oversight. Would you trust them to make the right call for all of us?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• AI Can Fool Millions Instantly – One surreal kangaroo clip got 48 million views in a day, and almost no one realized it was fake.

• The Feed Is Losing Its Credibility – With deepfakes, cloned voices, AI-generated influencers, and sludge videos, we are reaching a point where truth and fiction feel indistinguishable.

• The Internet's Future Is Still Ours to Shape – Whether we end up in an AI-powered renaissance or a swamp of confusion depends on the choices we make—what we share, trust, and value.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• Yuval Noah Harari: How to safeguard your mind in the age of junk information – Harari warns that humans can’t survive in AI’s nonstop information cycles and urges strict limits on our digital intake.

• The AI Dilemma – Tristan Harris & Aza Raskin (Center for Humane Tech) – On how runaway AI could derail trust, democracy, and the mind.

• It’s Getting Harder to Spot a Deep Fake Video – Explains deepfakes technically and how hard it is to spot them.

📖 Further reading:

• The Shallows by Nicholas Carr – A look at how the internet rewires our brains, and why trust, depth, and focus are slipping.

• Yuval Noah Harari on AI and “Fake Humans” (The Guardian, 2023) – A warning about the collapse of informational trust and democracy.

💡 Think for Yourself

• When you see something online that moves you, do you stop to ask: “Is this authentic?” Or have those instincts dulled?

• If almost everything in your digital life could be faked, what beliefs or relationships could still feel real?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Imagine waking up in 2030. Your entire digital world — messages, videos, music, even your face in a friend’s post — is generated by AI. Nothing is false. But nothing is wholly real either. What happens to your sense of self?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• Trolling isn't neutral, it’s performative cruelty – Many online comments aren't impulsive; they're crafted to earn approval from a group, often at someone else's expense.

• Empathy is easier, and more radical, than we think – Choosing not to mock someone isn’t some grand moral feat. Sometimes, it’s just about pausing before pressing “Post.”

• We disconnect to feel superior – From mocking vegans to humiliating influencers, trolling is often less about truth and more about establishing social status.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• Why Do People Troll? by LearnFree – Introduction to the motivations of trolls and what to do about them.

• The Psychology of Trolling by SciShow – A look at the psychology behind trolling.

• Are Internet Trolls Psychopathic? | Sadistic, Narcissistic & Antisocial Personality by Dr. Todd Grande – Diving into the personality traits related with trolling online.

📖 Further reading:

• So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson – Explores how digital shaming collapses lives and warps normal moral responses.

• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman – Although older, it helps contextualize how turning public discourse into entertainment leads to mass desensitization.

💡 Think for Yourself

• Have I ever laughed at suffering: not because it's funny, but because it made me feel "normal" or safe in a group?

• If I met the person I’m joking about face to face, would I still say it?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Imagine you're the subject of a viral joke. You can't reply. You can't move. But you can still read every comment.

Now scroll your favorite platform. Which post would you beg someone not to write?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• Awe isn’t gone, it’s just buried beneath adult perception – I explore how we don't lose awe with age, but rather crowd it out with distraction, utility, and over-analysis.

• Phones aren’t the core issue – I used to blame my devices, but awe didn’t return even when I turned them off. The problem runs deeper, into how we’ve trained our minds to interpret the world.

• Philosophy as a way back – When I revisit the world through philosophical wonder, even the familiar becomes strange, and awe quietly returns.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• Let's talk about "Awe" by ASU Department of Psychology – Professor Lani Shiota shares how awe is involved in her research

• Dacher Keltner: Why Awe Is Such an Important Emotion – Unpacks the biological and psychological roots of awe and why it matters

• The Amazing Power of Awe | Jonah Paquette | TEDxSonomaCounty – Jonah Paquette explains how the science of awe can boost our well-being and deepen your connection to life.

📖 Further reading:

• The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram – A poetic, philosophical look at how language and abstraction shifted how we relate to the natural world.

• Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder by Dacher Keltner – A research-backed book that explains how awe impacts our biology, decision-making, and connection to others.

💡 Think for Yourself

• When was the last time you felt genuine awe without needing to explain it, capture it, or share it?

• What routines, habits, or mental filters might be dulling your sensitivity to wonder?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Imagine waking up on a strange planet — with no memory, no language, and no way to measure time. Every sight is unfamiliar. Every sound, raw and new. Would a leaf astonish you again?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• Modern sport is shaped by spectacle, not tradition – From influencer-driven events to $1M jiu-jitsu prizes, we're optimizing for attention, not structure.

• The real competition isn’t on the field, it’s for your gaze – What gets views decides what survives. That creates pressure to be faster, flashier, and more extreme.

• The ethical paradox of sports – We celebrate violent knockouts but condemn chemical enhancement. Why are we okay with pain, but not with performance?

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• How Red Bull Became the Official Drink of Extreme Sports – Explores how Red Bull transformed from a simple energy drink into a dominant force in extreme sports.

• The dark side of the UFC | Four Corners Documentary – In-depth look into the UFC, highlighting issues such as fighter exploitation, health risks, and the commercialization of the sport.

• The Impact of Social Media on Pro Athletes – Delves into how social media platforms influence professional athletes’ lives, both positively and negatively.

📖 Further reading:

• The Ethics of Sport by Robert L. Simon – A foundational look at fairness, enhancement, and the meaning of competition.

• Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga – Explores play as a fundamental aspect of human culture, raising timeless questions about why we compete in the first place.

💡 Think for Yourself

• Would I push my body to its limits if I knew the audience demanded more?

• Do I watch for skill — or for something more primal, like risk and pain?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Imagine a future where sports split in two: one league enforces strict bans on enhancement, the other allows full chemical optimization. Which one do you watch on Sunday night?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• Beliefs Are Often Driven by Loyalty, Not Logic – We like to think our beliefs are rational, but often they come from loyalty to people, identities, or groups rather than evidence.

• Epistemic Partiality Shifts Our Standards – We subconsciously use different standards of evidence depending on who’s involved: we’re more forgiving (or skeptical) when it’s someone we care about.

• Some Irrationality May Be Human... But Dangerous – A bit of irrational loyalty can make us more human — but it can also lead us to defend the indefensible or ignore hard truths.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• How Psychics Exploit Our Cognitive Biases by SciShow Psych – SciShow Psych. Uses fortune-telling tricks to reveal confirmation bias and belief perseverance in action.

• Jonathan Haidt - Motivated Reasoning by Michael Wong – The moral-psychology scholar explains how reason acts as a “press secretary,” justifying gut intuitions instead of guiding them.

📖 Further reading:

• Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things by Dan Ariely – Behavioral-economics tour of conspiracy thinking and identity-driven misbelief.

• Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson – Classic exploration of cognitive dissonance and the stories we spin to protect our self-image.

🎧 Podcast to listen to:

• How motivated skepticism strengthens incorrect beliefs by You Are Not So Smart – David McRaney digs into the backfire effect and why debunking can entrench errors when beliefs are tied to identity.

💡 Think for Yourself

• Which belief of yours would you be most afraid to find out is wrong… and why?

• When was the last time you chose loyalty over truth — and would you do it again?

☁️ Thought Experiment

What if your best friend committed a crime — but you didn’t want to believe it? What would it take for you to finally accept the truth? And what would you do next?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• You’re Not Powerless, You’re Part of a System – Even if your individual choices feel small, they participate in collective behaviors that either sustain or disrupt global-scale harms.

• Expected Value Matters – A single action might have a low chance of changing the world — but when the possible impact is massive, even that sliver of probability can be morally significant.

• There Are Limits to Consequentialism – Some harms might be unjustifiable, even if they lead to great outcomes. The real ethical question is: should you dirty your hands for the greater good?

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• 3 ethical catastrophes you can help stop, right now | Peter Singer | Big Think – Peter’s Singer views on a few moral challenges we are facing as a society.

• The Horror of Utopia | The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas – A deep dive into Le Guin’s powerful ethical allegory.

📖 Further reading:

• The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer – The cornerstone of effective altruism and small-action ethics.

• The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin – A haunting short story that challenges utilitarian comfort zones.

💡 Think for Yourself

• If your small action has only a 0.01% chance of preventing catastrophic harm — are you still responsible for not taking it?

• Are there moral lines that should never be crossed, even if doing so would result in an enormous good?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Imagine you’re offered a deal: harm one conscious being in secret, and in return, ten million people will be cured of cancer. No one will ever know. No one will suffer except that one being. Would you say yes? And if not, why not?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• Skepticism is a Method – True skepticism isn't about distrusting everything but about carefully examining evidence and suspending judgment when needed.

• Ancient Thinkers Asked Hard Questions – From Socrates to Pyrrho, skepticism was about confronting uncertainty to gain clarity, not to dismiss truth.

• The Difference Between Ancient And Modern Skepticism – Ancient skepticism focused on exploring the limits of our knowledge about the external world, while modern philosophers like Descartes took skepticism further (doubting the very existence of the external world itself) in a quest to uncover what can be known with absolute certainty.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• Cartesian Skepticism by Crash Course Philosophy – A fast-paced, accessible intro to the different kinds of philosophical skepticism

• "I Think Therefore I Am" Explained by Alex O’Connor – A deep dive into Descartes and the broader context of radical doubt

📖 Further reading:

• "Philosophical Skepticism" by Charles Landesman – A compact and rigorous exploration of the various schools of doubt throughout history.

• "Descartes: An Intellectual Biography" by Stephen Gaukroger – If you want to understand why Descartes' skepticism was more than just a mental game, this is the one.

🎧 Podcast to listen to:

• Beyond Belief: Pyrrho and Skepticism by History of Philosophy – An in-depth look into the life and logic behind the most extreme form of skepticism

💡 Think for Yourself

• When you say you're being "skeptical," are you actually questioning things—​or just defending your own bias?

• Can you think of a time when healthy doubt helped you find a better answer, even if it was uncomfortable at first?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Imagine waking up one day and realizing every belief you’ve ever had — about politics, science, history — was based on flawed assumptions. Do you panic... or begin again with better questions?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• Questioning Everything Is Not Thinking Critically – Doubt without a method leads to manipulation, not wisdom.

• Trusting Experts Isn’t Blind Faith – True critical thinking requires knowing who to trust and why, not rejecting everyone by default.

• Admitting “I Don’t Know” Is Powerful – Intellectual humility is the foundation of real understanding, not a sign of weakness.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• “Why Do So Many People Believe in Conspiracy Theories?” by SciShow Psych — An investigation on why people believe conspiracies.

• How to Argue by CrashCourse – A beginner’s guide to the art and structure of argumentation.

📖 Further reading:

• Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole by Stephen Law – A sharp toolkit for spotting flawed reasoning and resisting manipulative arguments.

• Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them by Joseph E. Uscinski – Insight into how people fall into distrustful thinking without critical examination.

💡 Think for Yourself

• Do I apply my skepticism evenly, or only to ideas that challenge my worldview?

• What sources do I trust most, and why? Have I ever truly examined their reliability?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Imagine you’re told a new scientific breakthrough contradicts everything you believe about health, history, or politics. Would you investigate it fairly, or dismiss it immediately?

What if it came from a source you normally distrust?

Cheers,
Kevin

🔍 Key insights

• Critical thinking isn’t about winning debates – It’s about building a coherent, self-aware worldview by questioning your assumptions and refining your ideas.

• Beliefs are often emotional, not just rational – We resist changing our minds not because of lack of knowledge, but because identity and emotion are involved.

• We can adopt different discussion stances – Learning, exchange, teaching, and persuasion; each has its place, and knowing when to use which can change everything.

📚 Go deeper

🎥 Related videos:

• A TRICK to Using FIRST PRINCIPLES Thinking by Farnam Street – A critical exploration of first principles thinking, examining both its strengths and its inherent limitations.

• “What stops people from changing their minds?” by Big Think – An analysis of the psychological barriers to changing beliefs and why logical arguments often fail to persuade.

📖 Further reading:

• The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan – A defense of science and critical thinking as tools for navigating modern life.

• The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef – A practical guide to thinking more clearly by adopting a mindset focused on curiosity and truth-seeking rather than defending what you already believe.

🎧 Podcast to listen to:

• Sam Harris – The Limits of Persuasion (Making Sense #92) – A nuanced discussion of why facts alone rarely change minds.

💡 Think for Yourself

• Which belief of mine would I struggle most to defend if I had to explain it from first principles?

• Where am I trying to ‘win’ an argument instead of trying to understand?

☁️ Thought Experiment

Imagine your deepest-held opinion. Now picture hearing the perfect counterargument. One that logically dismantles your view.

Would you be willing to change your mind? Or would you find a way to protect your belief anyway?

What does that say about how you think?

Cheers,
Kevin