unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

How have economic crises throughout history shaped the relationships between nations? Which crises had a hand in wars and major global conflicts? 

Harold James is a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University. His recent book, Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization examines major economic upheavals from the 1840s to modern day. 

Greg and Harold chat about the concept of a crisis and its evolution, the delicate nature of interconnected economies, and how the World Wars contributed to hyperinflation or exchange rate stability and continue to impact economic policy today. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Robert Lucas Jr.
• Rudolf Hilferding
• William Stanley Jevons
• Léon Walras
• Carl Menger
• The Great Illusion by Norman Angell
• Georg Friedrich Knapp
• John Law
• Ben Bernanke

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Princeton University

His Work:

• Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization
• The War of Words: A Glossary of Globalization

From isolation to innovation lessons from the 1840s and 1970s

41:07: In the longer run, it seems to me that the pattern that I saw in the 1840s and the 1970s, that the longer-term reaction to a supply shock is actually to open up more. And the 1970s had exactly that. First of all, it's turning inward to the thinking that we can do it ourselves in all the big economies. And then an awareness that the most successful economies had actually not done that, turning in on themselves, but had remained open and had allowed themselves, as a consequence, to innovate. 

The 1840s crisis paves the way for a new era

04:05: The crisis of the 1840s generated something in the 1850s that brought the world into a new era, and it's really an era where the Marxist diagnosis gets less and less appropriate.

Understanding demand and supply shocks

27:50: The 2008 shock was really best thought of as a negative demand shock that was the consequence of a financial panic, a contagious financial panic. The 2020 shock was a negative supply shock. It has analogies with previous negative supply shocks, but can't be handled in the way that you deal with the absence of a demand shock in the wake of a financial crisis. So the way in which people might have dealt more effectively with the Great Depression and did deal quite effectively with the Great Financial Crisis, the Great Recession, whatever you like to call the 2008 story. And so the fiscal stabilization is much bigger in 2020 than it was in 2008, but really inappropriately so. So it pushes more inflation in these moments of demand shocks. You just want more demand. When it's a supply shock, you need a specific kind of good or commodity.

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With sex and gender becoming such politicized and polarizing issues recently, what’s a common sense approach to sorting through all the information to better understand the issues at hand? How have different struggles for equal rights throughout history shaped and informed these common-sense positions?

Doriane Lambelet Coleman is a professor at Duke Law School, specializing in scholarship on women, sports, children and law. She is also the author of On Sex and Gender: A Commonsense Approach and Fixing Columbine: The Challenge to American Liberalism.

Greg and Doriane discuss the evolving landscape of sex and gender, highlighting the shift from traditional binary definitions to more inclusive yet controversial perspectives. Doriane advocates for a balanced, evidence-based approach that recognizes both biological differences and the rights of transgender individuals. The conversation also touches on the legal implications of defining sex and gender and the socio-political dynamics that shape current debates. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Fourteenth Amendment
• The Equality Act
• Women's rights
• Civil rights movement
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• Equal Protection Clause
• Brown v. Board of Education
• Pauli Murray
• Thurgood Marshall
• Amateur Sports Act of 1978
• United States v. Virginia
• Judith Butler

Guest Profile:

• DorianeColeman.com
• Faculty Profile at Duke Law School
• Wikipedia Profile

Her Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• On Sex and Gender: A Commonsense Approach
• Fixing Columbine: The Challenge to American Liberalism

Balancing trans rights while acknowledging the reality of sex

46:59: Trans people, including trans women, of course, have every right to the same dignity and respect as anyone else, and certainly, equal protection should attach to everyone, including trans people. I don't think we can resolve the impasses without recognizing the difference between sex and gender. I think that we can have trans rights, but not by way of denying sex. In other words, the strategy that requires sex blindness in order to achieve rights for trans people is not going to work for a lot of females. And so, leaving the political right aside that doesn't want to see any gender diversity and working with people who want to be inclusive but also recognize that there are differences between females and trans women, it's going to require that trans advocates take a step back and accept that, in some places, we need to see sex, and we need to be smart about it.

What does it mean to be inclusive?

49:25: Being inclusive means taking into account relevant differences and ignoring differences that aren't relevant. That's really important to do, and we shouldn't shy away from that.

Confronting the provocative shift in our understanding of sex and gender

40:31: I think it's just a really provocative challenge to something so fundamental about ourselves and our society. Like, if you grow up understanding how fundamental sex is to you or gender is to you, and then somebody says it shouldn't be, or we're going to throw it out, or we're going to change what it means, or you can't use that word for yourself anymore, which is all the stuff that's happening, right? People are saying that you've got to start calling yourself a cis woman or, I mean, lots of vocabulary policing, all that kind of stuff about things that are so fundamental. I think it's super provocative, and I think it's super interesting. It's intellectual. It's a phenomenal intellectual challenge. It's an extraordinary political challenge.

Is sex difference an equality problem?

20:27: I think we've made a mistake to put all of sex into equality as an idea. That is the prism through which we view sex. Period, right? That anything you say about sex or do with sex that automatically belongs in the equality bucket, we've automatically got to, like, push it through this increasingly; it's technically intermediate scrutiny, but it's increasingly perceived as strict because that presumes that sex differences are bad. That presumes that any distinctions we would make on the basis of sex are bad. And I think that's wrong. I don't think sex is all bad. I don't think we should presume that most of it is bad. I think a lot of it is great. And so I think that we've made a mistake to see all of sex and sex differences as an equality problem.

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As we get better and better at training machines to emulate humans, are there certain aspects of human intelligence that artificial intelligence will never be able to copy?

Neil D. Lawrence is a professor of machine learning at the University of Cambridge. His new book, The Atomic Human: What Makes Us Unique in the Age of AI explores the meaning of intelligence as it relates to both humans and machines. 

Neil and Greg chat about the nuances of human intelligence and artificial intelligence, discussing how terminology affects perceptions and expectations of AI, pivotal technology advancements in history that paved the way for AI, and the insights Neil gained from his time at Amazon. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Centrifugal governor
• Bletchley Park
• Tommy Flowers
• Joaquin Quiñonero Candela
• David A. Mindell
• Pierre-Simon Laplace
• Robert Solow
• Jeff Wilke 
• Geoffrey Hinton

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Cambridge
• Professional Website

His Work:

• The Atomic Human: What Makes Us Unique in the Age of AI
• Google Scholar page

The trade-offs of increasing automation and the moral concerns of AI

25:16: As you increase automation, things that would have been moral judgments get moved into processes, whether that's courts of law or whatever; we tend to sort of codify what was a moral judgment, and it brings big advantages. It means we can live together at scale. It reduces the moral load we have if I can make a thousand employees redundant without having to worry individually about how many of them are single mums or whatever I'm worrying about. But, we lose something in that process. And one of the big concerns I have with AI is, yes, something like that's going to happen again. And I don't want to prejudge the future—what people will decide about where they want this technology automating decisions and where they want the human element in. But what I strongly feel is that, as a society, we're not being invited into that decision. And that decision is being made by very few companies and entities who themselves have proven themselves to have a very limited understanding of these subtle elements of society.

On the great AI fallacy

22:17: I think that the great AI fallacy was that we built anything that was going to adapt to us and accommodate us. When we hadn't, it was just more automation of things that humans had to do or could do in the past; but humans then had to accommodate this automation in order to make the best use of it.

Debunking the myth of AI as infallible, all-seeing, and dominating

31:38: One of the problems with the international conversation now is that it's conflating these two things. It's like the thing that appears intelligent is being intelligent through copying our own evolution, our cultural ideas, but then people are assuming that alongside that it has this characteristic of always getting things right, which is just not true because these shortcuts and heuristics it's using are our shortcuts and heuristics, which we know can fail in different circumstances.

What’s the role of software engineers in the emergence of AI?

55:09: So, this modern scribe is the software engineer in terms of the modern scribe, the person who can translate human ideas into things that can be on machines. So it's almost an advance in terms of the computer's powerful technology; it's actually an unpicking of the democratization of information technology.  Because as more and more of our understanding of the world is stored in machines, we're entering a world where it's harder for lawyers and accountants, etc., to access the machine. But this latest wave of technology offers the potential to put that right, because this latest wave makes it possible for a regular human to talk to a computer. 

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Historically, how were narratives used around race, species, and the beliefs of Western civilization? What have been the contemporary implications for those earlier societal beliefs?

Stefanos Geroulanos is the director of the Remarque Institute, a professor of history at New York University, and the author of several books. His latest book is called The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins. 

Greg and Stefanos discuss the complexities of defining human nature and the role of prehistory in understanding humanity's origins. Stefanos explores the ongoing debates about human progress, the impact of scientific discoveries like new fossils, and the culturally loaded interpretations of those findings. 

They also discuss how perspectives on indigenous populations and humanity's past are shaped by evolving scientific interpretations and narrative constructions, highlighting the intersection of science and politics in the research of human origins.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Tacitus
• Charles Darwin
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Thomas Hobbes
• Napoleon Chagnon
• The Dawn of Everything
• Jane Goodall
• Max Müller
• Maurice Olender
• Raymond Dart
• Neanderthal
• The Clan of the Cave Bear
• Gustav Victor Rudolf Born
• Memento mori
• Ozymandias
• Adam Smith

Guest Profile:

• Stefanos-Geroulanos.com
• Faculty Profile at NYU

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
• Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present
• The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept
• An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought
• The Problem of the Fetish
• The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War
• Staging the Third Reich: Essays in Cultural and Intellectual History
• The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas
• Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History
• Writings on Medicine
• Knowledge of Life
• Selected Writings: On Self-Organization, Philosophy, Bioethics, and Judaism

Understanding who we are as humans is key to recognizing our differences

47:37: If we can begin to admit that we are people who are culturally fundamentally, economically fundamentally different—our lemons come from half a world away, the meat that we consume from another half a world away, and so on. If we come around to understanding that our family structures, our relationships, our religious questions are structured in a different form, that our world is technologically bound, and that ultimately, one way or another, we have biological connections, but even our microbiomes must be fundamentally different from what ancient microbiomes were, then we will not end up having this need to say, "Here's where it's all begun."

Recognizing fundamental problems in our story opens paths beyond human origins research

54:49: Recognizing that there have been fundamental problems with a story is one path to recognizing that some of the things we believe in, and some of the hopes we want set, are not necessarily bound by that story entirely, nor were they ever necessarily or entirely bound by that story. I don't think that moral arguments would have ever utterly depended on human origins research.

How human origins research helped overcome traditional views

02:53: Human origins became really key at several stages, and at each of those stages, something absolutely current or something truly urgent was in play. Some of these moments had to do with overcoming traditional religious answers. Others had to do with an overcoming of ideas of human nature, so that certain kinds of stability of human nature and so on. Let's not pretend that they simply disappeared, but they did become secondary. And so human origins research came to fill that void. And in some respects, that's a real advance. And in some respects, that's a problem.

Two stories that helped convince people about evolution

44:40: I kept thinking, in some way, whether these stories of prehistory helped convince people about evolution. And I really thought that there were two of them that did. One was the bit that we were saying before about the thin veneer—that people came to use the expression so much and to believe there is a continuity between our antiquity and now. Not simply between another, meaning an indigenous person somewhere, but that person was a reflection of who we were. And that helped create the broader belief in human continuity. But the other one was this sense about a renaissance, that people would have to somehow come to this astonishing realization that their body is made of hundreds of thousands, millions of years, which is a story that they couldn't think of without these ruins within. 

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The long-held dominant narrative about evolution is that it works like a tree. But as science has advanced in the last century, the idea of a family tree might not tell the full story anymore. 

Evolutionary biologist David P. Mindell is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and the author of The Network of Life: A New View of Evolution which explores the concept of horizontal evolution alongside traditional Darwinian vertical evolution.

Greg and David discuss the importance of creating an updated narrative for evolutionary biology, the intricate nature of hybridization and horizontal gene transfer, the ethical implications of gene editing, and horizontal evolution’s potential application in medicine, agriculture, and public health. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Charles Darwin
• Richard Dawkins
• Ötzi
• Simon Schwendener
• Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper
• Frederick Griffith
• Gregor Mendel

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website
• Museum of Vertebrate Zoology Website

His Work:

• The Network of Life: A New View of Evolution

Why horizontal evolution matters for understanding life

35:07: We really have to rethink what are the major mechanisms of evolution for all of life, not just what we see in animals or animals and plants. And this is why I think there's been some resistance to this idea that horizontal evolution really is highly consequential. It's just that we tend still to be human-centric, then animal-centric, and then maybe animal- and plant-centric. But if we really want to understand the evolution of all of life, then we can see that horizontal evolution is a big deal. There's both still vertical and horizontal, but we can't neglect the horizontal evolution from the basic, the most basic narrative, especially for the public, if we want them to understand how evolution operates.

How important is an overarching narrative in making sense of new discoveries?

07:37: Narrative is so important because, especially for the public, we understand stories. We're kind of wired to understand a story. And when you get the outlines of a story, you get a lot more information than just the basics of the story. You get new information, and you can plug it into the story as well. So having a narrative that is squared with our best science is valuable because it informs our understanding of evolutionary biology overall.

The power of decentralized evolution in rapid change

14:08: I talk in the book [The Network of Life] about inheritance when you're talking about how horizontal evolution can be decentralized. This is a powerful concept because they are supposed to have pros and cons of decentralization, but one of the advantages of it is its rapid change and rapid innovation. And this certainly can be advantageous for organisms, particularly when they're in a changeable environment, to suddenly get a new set of genes that have already been honed for millions of years in some other organism. If you can manage, if an organism can, if those can be expressed, and they are potentially useful, that's a way to get much faster adaptation than single base pair substitutions, which is what you usually see between parents and progeny.

Can we use horizontal evolution to our benefit—wisely?

41:50: Humans will be doing more and more forms of hybridizations or tinkering with life forms. If we can find some that carry particular functions that humans are interested in and talk briefly about bacteria that have the ability to remediate environmental toxins, this is something most everybody agrees could be a good thing, or bacteria that are capable of producing energy, and so we will eventually be using horizontal evolution to our benefit. You know, the question is, can we do it wisely enough?

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When COVID-19 hit, many predictions were made about how the global pandemic would impact the macroeconomy. Some of those predictions were accurate, some of them turned out to be false alarms. But when business leaders need to make strategic decisions with macroeconomic forecasts in mind, how do they tell the truth from the doomsaying? 

Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak is the global chief economist at Boston Consulting Group. He also leads the BCG’s Center for Macroeconomics and regularly contributes to publications like the Harvard Business Review and Fortune.com. His book, Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms: How to Assess True Macroeconomic Risk delves into strategic ways business leaders can assess macroeconomic risk in the face of events like a global pandemic, war, or even presidential elections.

Philipp and Greg discuss the necessity for today’s executives to understand the macroeconomy, a new approach to judging macroeconomic risk, and why conventional models of the past might not be the best predictor for the macroeconomy’s future. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Ludwig von Mises
• Friedrich Hayek
• John Maynard Keynes
• The Phillips Curve 
• Thucydides Trap

Guest Profile:

• Professional Profile at Boston Consulting Group
• LinkedIn Profile

His Work:

• Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms: How to Assess True Macroeconomic Risk

Technology fuels productivity growth

31:53: What's important to recognize is that technology is only the fuel of productivity growth. That's what we call in the book [Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms]; it's the fuel, but you also need the spark. You need firms to actually embrace the technology and put it to use. And the spark—that's the tight labor market. When the availability of labor is low or when the price point is too high, that's when you first nudge firms and later force firms to replace their labor needs with technology.

How are leadership and macroeconomics connected?

06:30: Most leadership is about coming to a conviction of what the future will be like and adjusting actions around that conviction. Macro is no different, and the more we treat macroeconomics as a science, the worse the outcome will be.

How do we decide the optimal amount of history we ought to incorporate into our way of thinking about the world?

25:40: History has great case studies. It shows often coherent drivers that illuminate important parts of the story. But history is always idiosyncratic, and so applying it, extrapolating, or copy-pasting from history is exceedingly difficult, all the way to the sort of inevitability of the great power war. It's simply not true that a rising rival power always leads to great power conflict. I mean, most obviously, Britain was displaced by the U.S., and it didn't come to a head, or like a war or conflict in that sense. So, if you look at the patterns of some of these predictions, it fails right there in the sense that there never is a sort of template-like use of history. All of it is rather idiosyncratic, and that makes it both beautiful and treacherous as an analytical tool.

Navigating distractions with a strategic perspective

49:19: It's so easy to be distracted and go down every rabbit hole the financial press will lay out for you. Every data point is spun into disaster. For every true crisis, many false alarms. And how do we learn to navigate that with more calm and, frankly, a better experience? Well, it's by learning about that more strategic picture of how the thing works.

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How is technology disrupting on-the-job learning? What do we lose from outsourcing the work of novices to technological tools, and what do we gain? How do some surgical students make surprising decisions about where to do their residencies?

Matt Beane is an assistant professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also the author of The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines.

Greg and Matt discuss the impact of technology on work and tacit knowledge transmission, exploring topics like the economics of knowledge transfer, the necessity of Matt’s 3 C’s - Challenge, Complexity, and Connection - for skill development, and the implications of AI and remote work on learning. Matt also discusses his extensive field research and offers his ideas on improving learning and mentorship.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Techne
• Montessori education
• The Coddling of the American Mind
• Machine learning
• https://www.oneusefulthing.org/
• Nicholas Bloom
• Thomas Merton
• Ethan Mollick

Guest Profile:

• MattBeane.com
• Faculty Profile at UCSB
• LinkedIn
• Social Profile on X
• Profile on Thinkers50

His Work:

• The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines
• Wild World of Work Substack
• Don't Let AI Dumb You Down

​​Is connection strictly required for human connection?

40:28: Connection is the third of the three C's, strictly required for healthy skill development. And it is a warm bond of trust and respect between human beings, which we don't often think of as integral to developing skill, but that's integral in two ways. Practically, one is access. If you want to get better at something and I'm an expert, you have to earn my trust and respect to get a shot. I have to give you the job. I have to allow you in the room, whatever. But the other one is motivation, right? Yeah, humans like to produce effects in the world, and that's part of the motivation for skill, but part of it is status. Part of it is feeling like you fit in the social order. And so it is just intrinsically meaningful for us to earn the trust and respect of people who are better at something than us.

The novice is critical inflow for the expert

29:19: The novice is a critical inflow for the expert, a disturbing force. It's annoying, but it's also necessary to keep that expert sharp and ready to deal with today's challenges, not yesterday's.

How does healthy skill development occur?

23:38: Healthy skill development makes you robust to circumstances for machine learning and for human learning. The way that occurs is that as you progress towards skill in a particular area, you digest and consume collateral work. You make sense of your environment, the other jobs, tasks, skills, and data that are flowing through what you're doing.

On rules and discretion

25:39: Rules are useful, and this has to do with this complexity bit, like when and how. It's not just, do I engage with complexity? It's when and how. Before game time? During the game? Definitely not. But even in advance, there are numerous fine-grained different ways of, when is the right time to consume conceptual knowledge, including formalized rules and guidelines for how to do the work. The answer is, basically, don't read the manual before you start to try to use the VCR. You know, minimum exposure. Go try. That's a better time to rock back towards the conceptual.

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How important is creative thinking and the fusion of business and art in today's ever-evolving business landscape? What are the challenges of navigating uncharted futures with the role of AI?

Amy Whitaker teaches Arts Administration at New York University and is also the author of three books, including Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses and Economics of Visual Art: Market Practice and Market Resistance.

Greg and Amy discuss the value of integrating artistic mindsets into business environments. Their conversation delves into blockchain, NFTs, and the democratization of art, alongside anecdotes about the resilience and resourcefulness required for creative endeavors. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Saras Sarasvathy
• Sylvain Bureau
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Nina Katchadourian
• Julia Cameron
• Jenny Odell
• Katalin Karikó
• Roger Bannister
• Donald Winnicott
• David Foster Wallace
• John Maeda
• Sol LeWitt
• Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Guest Profile:

• AmyWhitaker.net
• Faculty Profile for NYU Steinhardt
• Creative Leadership Guild Institute
• Social Profile on Instagram
• Social Profile on X
• LinkedIn

Her Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses
• Economics of Visual Art: Market Practice and Market Resistance
• Museum Legs: Fatigue and Hope in the Face of Art

Can you be an artist in today's world without having to think about monetization and becoming part of the market?

11:21: I think that as a person, you have to think about being a citizen, and you have to think about being an economic actor. And I think that's true for artists. And I think it's that much more challenging for artists because artists are in a particular position of being both producers and investors, where they have to cover their day-to-day expenses, but they also have to take risks and show us things that are possible, where we are not able to perceive value until many years later, and that value is contestable. We wouldn't all agree on what it is.

Art and sustainable value creation 

10:24: We have to assume that everyone is an artist and that everyone has the potential to be an artist and think that that sort of dignity position has a lot of legs for us in terms of what our society can do. And what it means to have real sustainable value creation in our economy. I think it also is the most hopeful thing that I can come up with, with regard to the body politic as well.

The intersection of business and personal expression

45:25: I think that there's a way that people can understand business through their own ethos, as a person, and, in parallel, can relate to art and creativity without feeling like they have to be, you know, wearing a beret, the letter sort of like bringing your whole self to work and showing up in your particular way. And the envelope is doing that structurally.

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Much of the field of economics derives its theories from a subset of Adam Smith’s philosophy found in the Wealth of Nations. But are economists overlooking other parts of Adam Smith’s teachings that could explain more about human behavior and economics?  

Nobel-prize winning economist Vernon L. Smith is an emeritus professor of economics and law at Chapman University. His books like Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms and Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century explore how human behavior shapes economics.

Vernon and Greg discuss the role Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments plays in understanding behavioral economics, Vernon’s early supply and demand experiments, and how his work shaped the field of experimental economics. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Adam Smith 
• Stoicism
• Alfred Marshall
• Edward Chamberlin
• Milton Friedman
• Kevin A McCabe
• Charles Holt
• Betsy Hoffman

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Chapman University
• Nobel Prize Winner Bio

His Work:

• Economics of Markets: Neoclassical Theory, Experiments, and Theory of Classical Price Discovery
• Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms
• Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century 
• A Life of Experimental Economics, Volume I: Forty Years of Discovery
• A Life of Experimental Economics, Volume II: The Next Fifty Years

Do humans learn economics through experience, not theory?

39:09: People don't get the economics right by thinking about it. They get it right by actually participating in markets and getting a feel for what's going on. And I argue that humans are very good, once they do that. Sure, they can be fooled. And they do a lot of crazy things in a new market before they've acquired experience, but they adapt very well. And so, that equilibrium concepts are relevant. But the behavior is very much experience-oriented. And so, they get there through experiential learning. You see more than just abstract analysis and thinking about it.

Perspective is at the foundation of the theorem of moral sentiments

12:29: [The relationship] Perspective is at the foundation of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. That's what he's [Adam Smith] talking about—sentiments. An important part of it is fellow feeling.

Gratitude influences sacrifice and motivates cooperation

48:16: Gratitude creates indebtedness. And so people may have self-interested motivations, but they also have this motivation to get along with others. And so this proposition predicts, in the trust game, that people are sacrificing; they're taking less reward in order to do what they believe is right, to treat this person.

Why is Vernon championing Adam Smith’s principles in the modern way of thinking about economics?

56:45: So that's why I'm a champion of trying to get that pattern of thinking and Adam Smith's principles into the modern way of thinking in economics. Economics and psychology, and in economics, because the Theorem of Sentiments was a contribution to social psychology that just never took hold. It was another hundred years, you see, before psychology started to do anything. And it was the beginning of the 20th century before psychology became very prominent. And then it was individual psychology, not social psychology. I think Adam Smith would find that strange.

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Just like all people, scientists have their own morals and political ideologies. But how do those values influence their work? What are the potential ramifications of science mixing with politics? 

John Staddon is an emeritus professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and the author of numerous books. His works like Science in an Age of Unreason and Scientific Method: How Science Works, Fails to Work, and Pretends to Work examine the history of the scientific field and the challenges it faces today from becoming overly entangled with politics. 

John and Greg discuss the importance of distinguishing facts from values in scientific inquiry, how scientific consensus is often mistaken for truth, and the need for scientists to maintain objectivity despite societal pressures. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Is modern society abandoning the distinction between balance and fact?

04:59: Science itself cannot be racist. A fact is either true or false. There’s no moral element to simply a fact. There are younger people now, who simply cannot accept that a fact is just a fact. Now, you may react to it one way or another depending on your value system, but the fact by itself is not racist or not racist. So, this is a very serious problem, I think, in modern society because a lot of people have completely abandoned this distinction between fact and value. And it's wrecking, not nuclear physics or electronics, but it's wrecking the human sciences. 

Suppressing a fact can be just a harmful as promoting a lie

07:04: Logic tells you suppressing a fact can be just as harmful as promoting a lie, and indeed, suppressing a fact will often lead to promoting a lie as a substitute for it. So, you've just gotta keep them [emotions and judgment of the truth or falsity of facts] separate.

When uncertainty is the only honest answer in science

13:54: One should be more skeptical of social science because it's much harder to obtain a definitive result. [14:13]: So the really only honest response is to say, "I don't know." The problem is that society doesn't want to say, "I don't know." 

Are there too many scientists and too many scientific journals, with too much effort invested in the sciences?

22:19: Success in science, a lot of it's luck. You happen to be in an area where there's a problem that can be solved, and the opportunity comes, and you solve it. But it's certainly not true that by sheer effort you can find a fertile area. So that's one problem. The other problem, well, there are a number of points to make. One other one is that science is not a manufacturing process. It's like widgets, you know. If you want to double the number of people making widgets, you've got to double the number of widgets. Science is not like that. It has to be solvable problems. But if you double the number of scientists and the number of available problems is not doubled, you've got a problem because they've got to find something to do, and so on, and you're liable to generate as much noise as knowledge. 

Recommended Resources:

• J.D. Bernal 
• The Art of Scientific Investigation by William Ian Beveridge
• The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin
• Trofim Lysenko
• Jerry Coyne
• Richard Dawkins
• Alvin Weiberg
• B. F. Skinner
• Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey 
• Alan Greenspan

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Duke University

His Work:

• Science in an Age of Unreason
• The New Behaviorism: Second Edition 
• Scientific Method: How Science Works, Fails to Work, and Pretends to Work
• Unlucky Strike: Private Health and the Science, Law and Politics of Smoking
• The Englishman: Memoirs of a Psychobiologist
• Adaptive Dynamics: The Theoretical Analysis of Behavior 
• The Malign Hand of the Markets: The Insidious Forces on Wall Street that are Destroying Financial Markets – and What We Can Do About it

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