Change My Mind

Change My Mind

By Alex BuxedaScience
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Change My Mind episodes

  • The case against Car Dependency W/ Victor Dover

    Victor Dover is an innovator in city planning, neighborhood design and street design, he serves as president of the Parks Foundation of Miami-Dade and as a board member of the National Recreation & Parks Association.

    We talk about how the cost of car dependency is hidden from the individual by governmental subsidies, how the promised ‘’car freedom’’ in the 50s became car dependence which newer generations are rejecting, how maximum flow of cars occurs at medium speeds, the evil of minimum parking lots because it causes car dependence, that 0 is an absurd price for parking, that people will use the infrastructure that is built, the bankrupting nature of highways and the huge contrast of the big return on investment of bike lanes(both in financial and healthcare terms), how unbundling the price of apartments from that of parking spaces would make people realize how expensive cars are, the overprescription of both parking and opioids in the US, how reducing population density increases traffic due to increased kilometers driven, how new businesses like Uber and Cabify are diminishing the amount of parking demanded & how dynamic parking pricing according to demand is optimal.


    Buy his book Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns

    Check his web page at doverkohl.com

    Check his YouTube channel at @DoverKohl

    1 hr 16 min
  • The Metaphorical Truth of Fiction W/ David E. Feldman

    Today I had a conversation with David E. Feldman, he is an author of mysteries, crime fiction and the occasional standalone novel, which might be called literary fiction, historical drama or family saga.

    David has overcome drug addiction, spinal problems that were heading for paralysis, 2 hip replacements, intestinal resection with colostomy and cancer. He is also a working musician and painter.

    We talked about the coexistence of the better and worse angels of our nature, the key for a successful marriage, our natural curiosity toward hidden plots or conspiracies, the interconnectedness of the world, spirituality, science, the massive magnitude of our ignorance, causality, that the conditions of something to exists have to be given in order for it to exist, if they do not, that thing does not exist, the nature of the mind, consciousness, panpsychism, rational tradeoffs, the need for compassion, the unjustified nature of being unkind to anyone, and much more!


    His most recent books include A Special Storm: Dora Ellison's Mystery Book 5 and The Neighborhood, which is about a Black family moving into an all white neighborhood.

    Check David’s webpage at davidefeldman.com

    Check David’s books at his Amazon page

    1 hr 18 min
  • Pondering Death

    I am joined today by my friend Emilio to discuss the inevitable end of our journey, the value of noticing your own mortality, the dichotomy between life and death, the process of appreciating things and people while they are around us, the need for acting in a virtuous manner while we can, how the Stoics dealt with death and whether developing an objective morality is possible.

    1 hr 29 min
  • Self Improvement, limiting beliefs and Becoming a Person of Value W/ Jeevan Matharu

    Jeevan Matharu is a wealth management partner at True Potential LLP and transformational coach at Vanquish transformational coaching.


    We discussed limiting thoughts, imposter syndrome, unconditional commitments leading to deeper consequences(as in marriage, the externalization of justice through the legal system and not stealing organs) not foreseeable by a narrow analysis, how being rational requires taking into account other people’s irrationality, the origin of morality, the naturalistic fallacy, raw darwinism determining what exists at the level of moral judgment, the importance of realizing the difference between what feels good and what is good, the need for enjoying your craft to achieve top performance, the need for dialogue in avoiding violence, how it is not the most violent chimp that dominates but the most cohesive one, how bureaucracy is a system which conveniently separates people of the consequences of their acts, natural selection in relation to who rules a country and your mind and the difference between Real vs Deal friends.


    Check Jeevan’s Linkdin

    Jeevan’s Instagram

    Jeevan’s Webpage

    Check his book Become a Person of Value

    1 hr 15 min
  • Fake Feelings & Rationality W/ Luca Petersen

    My good friend Luca joins me to discuss the difference between what FEELS good and what IS good, a doughnut feels good but is not good(in the long term), our feelings fool us.

    We talk about the trueness and fakeness of different feelings which is in the bullseye of effective altruism’s principal flaw: that what feels the best when doing good is not what has the biggest impact, zero sum vs positive sum games, Intelligence singularity, utilitarian ethics reduced to the absurd with the repugnant conclusion, that we have trade offs all the way down, the high cost of nationalism, that for me to be rational requires taking into account your irrationality, the scientific method, that applying selection at a lower level allows higher levels to not be killed, Goodhart's law, and that Ideas being selected for in our minds in a natural selection way makes us unable to get away of the naturalistic fallacy in some way.

    1 hr 24 min
  • The limits of Self-Improvement W/ Patric Schiess

    I am joined by my friend Patric for a second time (we discussed what failure is on a previous occasion)to discuss the limits of self-improvement and why everyone should try it. Improving yourself is actually worth the effort.

    We talk about how dopamine is the ultimate currency, that discipline is consistently doing what is known to be good even if it feels bad, the factors affecting Luck vs unluck, the difference between what you wish and what you wish to wish, the benefits of meditation and meta-cognition(being aware of being aware) in avoiding anger and suffering, the fact that our judgment is not perfect but our judgment of our judgment is better calibrated and that our inherent plasticity allows our character to be nudged in the direction of our acts.

    54 min
  • The case Against Porn W/ Roman Mironov

    Roman Mironov is a coach, he helps men get their act together by getting them out of their porn addiction, he himself wasted many years addicted to porn. You don’t have to make his same mistake.


    Roman and I talked about:

    1: How porn is to sex as McDonald’s is to food.

    2: That any male can now see more naked females in 1 day than kings did in their whole lives.

    The reward mechanism of males is hijacked by what seems to be ‘’evolutionary success’’(seeing many naked females) that in reality is a shallow pleasure that depletes them of their natural drive to improve themselves and their community.

    3: The abyss between the female and male sexual psychologies.

    Not understanding the profound differences in the sexual psychologies between males and females leads to conflict and friction. The solution, as we propose, is to understand the biological basis and the evolutionary process leading to this difference, which emerges from the differing optimal strategy in terms of gene reproduction between males and females, a phenomenon that is seen among all classes of animals and even among plants! While what arouses females is predominantly a mixture of status, commitment and romance, what arouses males is sexual variety and cues of fertility, this is why Japanese anime titillate the male brain while paranormal romance is its match for the female brain.


    Check Roman’s web page

    Roman’s YouTube channel

    Roman’s Instagram

    57 min
  • Advancing STEM Disciplines W/ Brett Hoffstadt

    Brett Hoffstadt is an aerospace Engineer, Innovator and a prolific Author. His books are mainly focused in inspiring children’s curiosity in STEM fields, he has authored titles such as "Exploring Smart Cities for Kids","Goodnight Moon Base" and "How To Be a Rocket Scientist: 10 Powerful Tips to Enter the Aerospace Field and Launch the Career of Your Dreams".


    We talk about the fundamental role of the STEM disciplines in our society, the benefits of having a permanent inhabited base on the moon, the multifacetedness of engineering, the unity of knowledge, the inherent tendency of humans to explore what is outside of the known, the importance of people skills, the ethics of avoiding existential risks and much more.


    Check Brett’s LinkedIn

    Brett’s Amazon page

    Brett’s Blog

    56 min
  • Why Public Libraries and Copyright Laws are Not Compatible

    I explain in this bonus episode my views on how incompatible simultaneously stating that a public library and copyright laws are a good thing is.

    It is socially accepted for public libraries to exist so that in principle everyone has access to any book without paying for it in the moment, but this is not coherent with another belief that society simultaneously holds as unacceptable: downloading the ebook for free infringing the copyright law.

    I am not trying to argue against copyright law, I am just pointing my finger at a cognitive dissonance I believe to have found in the general public.

    The border between owning a book and not doing so is blurred when you take into account that 99% of the time we spend paying attention to a book is when we read it.

    If the objective was to 1maximize the revenue of authors and at the same time promote their books by giving them a showcase in which their work can get known so that we incentivize the production of books while 2making their books accessible for the general population, we would be incredibly lucky if the best tradeoff of these objectives were maximized by what we happened to stumble upon with our social conventions.

    There is clearly a diminishment in the amount of sales when someone reads a book from a public library, specially among the people with a lesser taste toward owning a book on a permanent manner, why should we subsidize people who happen to have this taste and not focus instead in the less well off people in our society?

    I would love to hear your opinions on the so please do comment them on the youtube video of this episode if you wish so.

    15 min
  • Grief, Wisdom & Success W/ Jan Goss

    Jan Goss is the Founder of Show Up Well Consulting, an Austin based firm specializing in personal and professional development.


    On this episode we talked about grief, the process of healing from it, how achieving success in spite of social pressure dragging you to mediocrity can happen if you have enough drive and know how to play your cards, what wisdom is, gratitude and the unfortunate fact that on many occasions we only value some things when we lose them, the value of the knowledge inherited from previous generations and more.


    Check Jan Goss' web page www.showupwell.com

    Jan's instagram

    Buy Jan's latest book Bedroom Etiquette: How to Show Up Well Behind Closed Doors

    47 min

About Change My Mind

From the publisher's feed

The purpose of dialogue is to let ideas die instead of us.