Maiden Mother Matriarch with Louise Perry

The line between medical disorder and normal bodily or mental function has become increasingly blurred. This is particularly apparent when it comes to mental illness disorders, the boundaries of which are expanding all the time. Diagnoses of conditions like autism, ADHD, depression, and anxiety have risen enormously in a short period of time, partly driven by social mimesis, including via the internet.

But it's not only mental health diagnoses which have become more common. Genetic tests can now detect pathologies decades before people experience symptoms, and sometimes before they're even born. And increased health screening draws more and more people into believing they are unwell.

My guest today argues that we are seeing a process of 'diagnosis creep', the result of both increasingly sensitive modern testing, and also a social push towards seeking out diagnoses to explain dysfunction that would historically have gone un-labelled. Suzanne O'Sullivan is a consultant clinical neurologist working in the NHS, and in her book 'The Age of Diagnosis' she suggests that this overdiagnosis can sometimes cause serious harm.

MMM is sponsored by 321 - a new online introduction to Christianity, presented by former MMM guest Glen Scrivener. Check it out for free at 321course.com/MMM. Just enter your email, choose a password and you’re in — there’s no spam and no fees.

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As the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt once put it, “a shrinking, aging world is something that we're intuitively, almost completely unprepared to encounter, because all of our experience, in ways that we don't even think about, has been framed by a growing world population.”

Nowhere is this more true than in the discipline of economics. The great well of economic theory that we are familiar with was all written during times of population growth. We are about to enter uncharted territory, and my guest today argues that demography is now the most fundamental force shaping our economic future.

The demographer Paul Morland is a former Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Senior Member at St Antony's College, Oxford. His previous books include 'The Human Tide' and 'No One Left.' He is the co-author, with Philip Pilkington, of a new book titled 'Bust: The Economics of Population Decline', which argues that depopulation triggered by low birth rates is already transforming our economies, not only in the developed world, but everywhere.

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This interview was actually recorded before Suella Braverman's most recent Question Time appearance, which sparked a public row over the question of English identity and ethnicity. As it happens, that was one of the topics we covered in our conversation, which is themed around Suella's new memoir, an account of her family's experiences of the British Empire, and her vision for modern Britain.

Suella Braverman is a politician, barrister, and former Attorney General and Home Secretary. Earlier this year, she defected from the Conservative Party to Reform UK, and now serves as their spokesperson for education, skills, and equality. Suella's new book is titled 'Patriot: Empire, Betrayal, and Hope.'

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In 2019, Rusty Reno – editor of First Things magazine – published ‘Return of the Strong Gods’, a book that argued that the postwar ideological order of tolerance and openness had overreached, and that we were set to see the reemergence of “strong gods” in politics—that is, the powerful loyalties that bind people to their homelands and to one another.

Today, Rusty and I return to this thesis seven years on. Populism is certainly ascendent, and not only in the United States. Should we be worried about the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction? Or should the “strong gods” be welcomed?

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Just in the last few weeks, the issue of AI safety has suddenly broken into the political mainstream. What was once a fairly niche debate within the worlds of tech and philosophy is now on the front pages. And the question of AI is, predictably enough, quickly turning into a partisan issue, with the President opposing heavy federal guardrails, and the Democrats calling for aggressive regulation.

Today's episode is about the subculture from which the AI safety movement emerged. Rationalism – which is tightly entwined with Effective Altruism – is an intellectual movement popular among millennials working in tech.

My guest today is the writer and tech worker Jacob Falkovich, who describes himself as a post-rationalist. As you'll hear, it's pretty hard to find someone who actually calls themselves a 'rationalist' (that's the nature of the subculture), but Jacob is willing to make an earnest defence of rationalism, and of Effective Altruism, and of the AI safety movement.

These are interesting and – I think – very influential subcultures. If we want to understand the AI safety movement, then we need to understand rationalism.

MMM is sponsored by 321 - a new online introduction to Christianity, presented by former MMM guest Glen Scrivener. Check it out for free at 321course.com/MMM. Just enter your email, choose a password and you’re in — there’s no spam and no fees.

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A life without pain sounds wonderful. It would also be fatal. Pain feels bad because it has a job: measuring damage to your body and motivating you to protect it. Every other feeling has a job too, built by natural selection. Hunger measures your need for calories and motivates you to eat. Envy measures others’ success and motivates you to close the gap. Frustration measures the futility of your current approach and motivates you to try a new one.

In 'All the Feels', evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban explains the evolved function of our emotions and sensations, from anger to the urge to yawn. In today's episode we speak in particular about negative and unpleasant emotions, particularly anxiety and depression. Are they doing something useful for us? Or is evolutionary mismatch causing us to feel worse than we need to? 

Rob Kurzban is an evolutionary psychologist who was a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania for over a decade. His new book is titled 'All the Feels: The Evolved Function of Every Human Emotion and Sensation.'

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