The Disagreement

This disagreement is on The Ethics of Having Kids.

In the age of climate change, is it more ethical to have kids or not have kids? What are the costs and benefits of either choice when the reality of our shared future is unknown? What does the pro-natalist movement and its policies get right and wrong?

Heather Houser is a professor of English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. A cultural critic and author of the book Infowhelm, Heather is an expert on climate change and feminism.

Liz Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes about theology, politics and policy. Previously, Liz was an opinion writer for The New York Times and The Washington Post, where she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

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Today’s disagreement is on AI tutoring and K-12 Education. How will AI tutoring benefit struggling and high achieving students? Will it enable personalized learning pathways for students?

Two education experts come together for a longform, productive disagreement about whether AI is going to usher in a new era of personalized learning – and whether that is a good thing.

Niels Hoven is the Founder and CEO of Mentava, a software company committed to accelerating learning for top-performing students. Mentava’s first product is a software-based tutor, designed to teach preschool students how to read.

Benjamin Riley is the founder of Cognitive Resonance, a new venture dedicated to improving understanding of human cognition and generative AI. Previously, he founded and served as CEO of Deans for Impact, a nonprofit education organization working to improve teacher training through the use of cognitive science.

Show Notes

• Reflections on personalized learning 15 years in [03:00]
• AI and the new path to personalized learning [05:02]
• The risk of moving away from collective learning [06:47]
• Theory of mind considerations [10:10]
• Bill gates and the dream of AI in Ed [15:17]
• The future of ungated learning [17:15]
• The danger of magnifying differences [20:12]
• The 5% problem [22:15]
• Engagement and learning [23:40]
• Balancing AI risks and benefits [30:09]
• Is our current system working or failing [33:05]
• What should we be improving [36:32]
• The joy of effortful thinking [38:01]
• Steelmanning [40:20]

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Gentle parenting can be seen as a movement and generational push-back against the parenting styles that Gen-Xers and Millennials grew up with. We use “Gentle Parenting” as a stand-in for the entire constellation of modern parenting brands: Peaceful, Respectful, Mindful, Intentional, Conscious, Compassionate, Sturdy…While there are some small differences between each method, they all generally follow the core “gentle” tenets.

Ryan Allen is a licensed child therapist and gentle parenting expert and influencer. He specializes in helping “little kids with big emotions.” He’s a bit of a social media phenom, with 1M followers on TikTok.

Lori Gotlieb is a psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author. Her book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, has sold more than a million copies. She also co-hosts the podcast “Dear Therapists” and writes The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” advice column.

• How should parents help kids regulate their emotions? 
• What is the right role for punishments and consequences?
• And…what is the happy medium between “Because I said so!” and Lord of the Flies?

Lori Gottlieb’s 2011 Article in the Atlantic: “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy”

Dr. Becky, Founder of Good Inside and ‘Millennial Parenting Whisperer’

Janet Lansbury’s ‘No Bad Kids’ Method

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Today’s disagreement is on Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risk. In this episode, we ask the most consequential question we’ve asked so far on this show: Do rapidly advancing AI systems pose an existential threat to humanity?

To have this conversation, we’ve brought together two experts: a world class computer scientist and a Silicon Valley AI entrepreneur.

Roman Yampolskiy is an associate professor of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Louisville. His most recent book is: AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable.

Alan Cowen is the Chief Executive Officer of Hume AI, a startup developing “emotionally intelligent AI.” His company recently raised $50M from top-tier venture capitalists to pursue the first fully empathic AI – an AI that can both understand our emotional states and replicate them. Alan has a PhD in computational psychology from Berkeley and previously worked at Google in the DeepMind AI lab.

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Today we have a disagreement on whether there’s a retirement crisis in the United States. To have this conversation, we’ve brought together two thought leaders on the topic.

Andrew Biggs is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He studies social security reform, pensions and public sector benefits. Before joining AEI, Biggs was the principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration.

Monique Morrissey is a Senior Economist at the Economic Policy Institute. Her areas of expertise span social security, pensions, older workers and household savings. A member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, Monique is active in efforts to reform the private retirement system.

• Will millions of us never be able to stop working?
• Is social security actually on the verge of collapse?
• How much should we be panicking?

Before we get started, economists think about retirement as a three-legged stool: social security, employer retirement accounts, and personal savings or other assets. We’ll talk about all three legs, how shaky they are, and whether or not the U.S. government needs to fold up a napkin and jam it under one or two of them. ;)

Since the 1970s, there has been a national shift away from defined-benefit plans or “DB Plans,” such as pensions, in which employers funded and guaranteed a retirement benefit for their workers. We started seeing a lot more defined-contribution (“DC Plans”) such as 401(k)s, where workers primarily fund their own accounts, and employers can match contributions - or choose not to. 

This episode is moderated by Catherine Cushenberry.

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The disagreement over the concept of white privilege is at the center of many of our political and cultural struggles at the moment. 

On the Left, white privilege is a bedrock principle, a foundational assumption that motivates much of the discourse around race in America. On the Right, the concept is primarily an object of derision. It’s dismissed, mocked and held up as the sign of the Left’s moral confusion and obsession with identity politics.

To work through this problem, we’ve brought together a Black conservative philosopher and a white anti-racist activist.

Jason D. Hill is a professor of philosophy and the author of five books, including most recently What Do White Americans Owe Black People: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and has been a professional writer and author for more than thirty years. 

Garrett Bucks is the founder of The Barnraisers Project, which is committed to organizing majority-white communities for racial and social justice. He is also the author of the popular Substack newsletter The White Pages, and recently released a memoir called The Right Kind of White.

• Does white privilege exist?
• How does it interact with other forms of privilege, like class class and gender?
• Is it a useful concept politically and culturally?

• 3:09 - Defining white privilege
• 6:22 - White working class critique
• 12:44 - Black excellence
• 15:04 - American individualism vs. communitarianism
• 16:41 - Black immigrant experiences
• 19:15 - On Robin DiAngelo
• 22:58 - Left and Right class critiques of racial privilege
• 25:11 - Intersectionality
• 28:19 - White saviors
• 33:02 - White guilt
• 36:34 - Steelmanning

Further Reading

Jason Hill’s letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates

Critique of Robin DiAngelo

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh

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Today’s disagreement is on whether or not extraterrestrial life exists. We’ve brought on two guests who are out of this world. ;)

Dr. Avi Loeb is an astrophysicist and professor of Science at Harvard University. As head of The Galileo Project at Harvard, Dr. Loeb directs the search for evidence of extraterrestrials. Avi is also the author of more than eight hundred scientific papers and the books Interstellar and Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine. He is the bestselling author of many books, including Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain. Michael is the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University.

Today we ask a wide range of important questions about extraterrestrial life:

• Do we already have evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life?
• What would it take for us to all agree there are technological civilizations beyond earth?
• How does the media complicate our understanding of the subject?
• And why is there so much tension in the scientific community about this work?

• Fermi’s question: where is everybody? [3:45]
• Addressing anomalies [6:45]
• Radio communication versus finding objects [10:00]
• Why media coverage loves “aliens” [12:00]
• Skepticism and anomalies [14:00]
• Disagreements in the scientific community [16:00]
• Real material evidence and the US government [21:00]
• Machine learning for observing anomalous objects [27:00]
• Steelmanning [31:30]

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Today’s disagreement is about criminal justice reform, specifically the state of policing and incarceration in the United States. To explore its contours, we’ve brought on two experts in criminal justice.

Rafael A. Mangual works on the Policing & Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He is a contributing editor of City Journal AND is the author of Criminal (In)Justice: What The Push For Decarceration And Depolicing Gets Wrong And Who It Hurts Most.

Chesa Boudin is the founding executive director of Berkeley's Criminal Law and Justice Center. Previously, Chesa served as elected district attorney for the city of San Francisco from 2020 - 2022 as part of a wave of “progressive prosecutors.” In 2022, there was a successful recall campaign that resulted in him leaving the office. Chesa’s biological parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, were members of the weather underground, who went to prison and served a combined 62 years. As you’ll hear him reference, he grew up visiting his parents in prison.

Today we ask a wide range of important questions about criminal justice reform.

• What is the rationale behind incarceration? Is it an effective means of deterring and preventing crime?
• What is the right role for the police to play in communities?
• Should police spend less time and energy responding to smaller, non-violent offenses and be more focused on preventing and responding to violent crime?

This is an incredibly consequential topic that has a massive impact on the lives of millions of Americans. As you are likely aware, the entire life cycle of the criminal justice system impacts marginalized communities and communities of color in highly disproportionate ways. We discuss this explicitly at times but it also hovers over the entire conversation. 

There’s a lot of data in this episode so strap in – take breaks whenever you need it.  

• Four theories of incarceration - [10:00]
• Deterrence and Sentence Length [15:00]
• Incapacitation [18:00]
• Recidivism, Cost and Age [19:30]
• Measuring Arrests versus Convictions [26:00]
• Geographic concentration of violence [29:00]
• Arrest patterns and offenders [31:00]
• Role of policing [39:00]
• Policing versus prosecution

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What you’re about to hear is a powerful and sustained disagreement with the current discourse on youth gender medicine and the more extreme voices who tend to dominate the public conversation. 

Gender-affirming care, as defined by the World Health Organization, includes social, psychological, behavioral, and medical interventions “designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity” when it conflicts with their gender assigned at birth.

How long should physicians and clinicians observe a child before they decide to treat them for gender dysphoria?

When (if ever) should a child socially transition, begin hormones, and/or undergo surgery for their gender?

Dr. Erica Anderson is an internationally recognized clinical psychologist and academic, specializing in Gender, Sexuality, and Identity. She served on the medical staff of the Youth Gender Clinic at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital and on the board of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).

Dr. Jack Drescher is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). In 2022, Dr. Drescher was a member of the APA’s DSM-5 Workgroup on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders – responsible for revising the definition of what is now referred to as “gender dysphoria.” An openly gay psychiatrist, Dr. Drescher has also served on the World Health Organization’s workgroup revising sexual and gender diagnoses.

• Defining gender [04:16]
• Shift in patients at pediatric gender clinics [11:20]
• The Canadian approach [16:33]
• Treatment options [20:11]
• Determining if a child will benefit from transition [27:04]
• Increase in cases [29:19]
• Risks and benefits of treatment [35:01]
• Level of caution for when to use medicines [42:46]
• Canadian vs Dutch approach [46:58]
• Question of rapid medicalization [49:14]
• Difficulty of the conversation [54:44]
• Comparison with gay marriage [57:24]

Do you have questions or comments about this episode? Email us at [email protected] or find us on X and Instagram @thedisagreementhq.

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