Upon Reflection

Every year, many people receive antibiotics they don't need or they take them for longer than necessary. You might think this isn't a problem. After all, many antibiotics are cheap and have relatively mild side effects. But the more we use antibiotics, the more opportunities we create for bacteria to evolve immunity, making antibiotics so ineffective that otherwise common and treatable infections can become serious or even deadly — also known as antibiotic resistance.

So who's responsible for making sure antibiotics are used only when necessary and only as long as necessary?

In a short commentary in The American Journal of Bioethics, I argue that it is not just doctors that have duties to minimize and shorten antibiotic courses. If recent arguments are any indication, anyone who communicates about, studies, or reviews antibiotic decisions may have similar obligations.

In this episode I'll lay out the argument and its implications for health systems.

Byrd, N. (2026). The Patient and Pharmacy Sides of 'Shorter Is Better' Antibiotic Stewardship. The American Journal of Bioethics, 26(9), 132–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2026.2709547

As always, free preprints of my papers are available on my CV at byrdnick.com/cv under "Publications".

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In late 2025, artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI automated the process of determining which model is best for a task. This allowed users to simply send their prompt and let the system determine whether to respond “fast" or "slow".

In a 2022 paper, I suggested that this kind of strategic deployment of slow, more reflective reasoning could be crucial to good judgment and decision-making. Since then, I have been synthesizing the arguments and evidence for this view in a paper titled, "Strategic Reflectivism in Intelligent Systems".

After the new paper was accepted in Lecture Notes In Computer Science, I recorded a podcast of me reading the final proofs of the paper. I review evidence suggesting that one key to intelligence in humans and machines is pragmatic switching between intuitive and reflective thinking based on the goals of the system. The paper has a wide range of implications for applied science, computer science, decision science, and epistemology.

Byrd, N. (2025). Strategic Reflectivism In Intelligent Systems. Lecture Notes In Computer Science. Preprint: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.22987

As always, free preprints of my papers are available on my CV at byrdnick.com/cv under "Publications".

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You can find the Upon Reflection podcast here or in your podcast app. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe wherever you find podcasts, follow on BlueSky at @ByrdNick.com, on Mastadon (@ByrdNick), and all the other platforms.  If you end up enjoying the Upon Reflection podcast, then feel free to tell people about it — online, in person, or in your review.

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You may have heard me drone on and on about this thing called "reflective thinking". We philosophers and cognitive scientists are preoccupied with it. However, the term 'reflection' is sometimes used in different ways by scholars. To unify, make sense of, and guide our research, I synthesized a unified account from hundreds of years of English language, from philosophers, and from cognitive science. The result is this paper.

In this episode, I'll read the paper, which explains the two key features of 'reflection' and how we measure them. This two-factor account of reflective thinking has implications for theories of rationality, self-knowledge, and dual-process theories.

Byrd, N. (2025). A Two-Factor Explication of “Reflection”: Unifying, Making Sense of, and Guiding the Philosophy and Science of Reflective Reasoning. Res Philosophica, 102(3), 373–392. https://doi.org/10.5840/resphilosophica2711

As always, free preprints of my papers are available on my CV at byrdnick.com/cv under "Publications".

This episode's affiliate partner is Coursera. Coursera has something for everyone: students, teachers, schools, companies, and even governments. Find out how they can serve your education needs at Coursera.com/BYRD.

You can find the Upon Reflection podcast here or in your podcast app. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe wherever you find podcasts, follow on BlueSky at @ByrdNick.com, on Mastadon (@ByrdNick), and all the other platforms.  If you end up enjoying the Upon Reflection podcast, then feel free to tell people about it, online, in person, or in your review.

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You may have heard that atheists tend to score better on reflection tests than theists? But why do scientists find this "analytic atheism" correlation?

Many studies have attempted to answer this question. Of course, even the best studies had limitations. So Steve Stich, Justin Sytsma, and I developed better methods and studied over 70,000 people on 6 continents. What did we find?

Apostasy was key. Those who shed their religion since childhood were the most reflective. Lifelong atheists were not necessarily more reflective than theists. In other words, the analytic atheism correlation seems to be explained by analytic apostasy.

In this episode, I'll explain the methods, results, and implications in our paper "Analytic Atheism & Analytic Apostasy Across Cultures" which will be published in Religious Studies.

Byrd, N., Stich, S., & Sytsma, J. (2025). Analytic atheism and analytic apostasy across cultures. Religious Studies. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412525000198

As always, free preprints of my papers are available on my CV at byrdnick.com/cv under "Publications".

This episode's affiliate partner is PDF Expert. Since I bought PDF Expert in January 2016, it has been my primary reading and annotating app on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. I often try the best free and paid competitors, but I keep coming back to PDF Expert. Find out why at readdle.8kpa2n.net/Byrd.

You can find the Upon Reflection podcast here or in your podcast app. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe wherever you find podcasts, follow on BlueSky at @ByrdNick.com, on Mastadon (@ByrdNick), and all the other platforms.  If you end up enjoying the Upon Reflection podcast, then feel free to tell people about it, online, in person, or in your review.

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Suppose you glance at a clock that, unbeknownst to you, is broken, showing the same time all day. Nonetheless, you happened to look at the clock precisely when it showed the correct time. So your belief about the time is correct. My question is this: did you know what time it is?

Perhaps you think that you did. After all, you formed a belief on the basis of a device that most people trust and the belief was true! What else would it mean to know something? Well, in academic philosophy, the orthodox answer to this kind of thought experiment is "no".

People who perform better on tests of reflective thinking tend to report philosophers' orthodox answer to this kind of thought experiment. And, if you've been following my research, you know that philosophers are particularly reflective thinkers. These correlations may make you wonder about causation. Does thinking reflectively cause people to accept philosophers' orthodoxy? Or is it the other way around: does studying thought experiments like the broken clock case somehow result in people performing better on reflection tests?

In this episode, I'll tell you about the experiment I ran to find out. The paper is titled "Reflection-Philosophy Order Effects and Correlations Across Samples" and has been accepted for publication in Analysis. The paper will also mention a bunch of other thought experiments, tests of reflective thinking, and measures of research participants' data quality.

Byrd, N. (2025). Reflection-Philosophy Order Effects and Correlations Across Samples. Analysis. Preprint: 10.31234/osf.io/y8sdm. Open access article: 10.1093/analys/anaf015

As always, free preprints of my papers are available on my CV at byrdnick.com/cv under "Publications".

This episode's affiliate partner is Spark Education, who is offering free 30-minute class demo for your child. You can read about the testimonials, stats, and all the activities included in their latest offer at SparkMath.pxf.io/PObNOR.

You can find the Upon Reflection podcast here or in your podcast app. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe wherever you find podcasts, follow on BlueSky at @ByrdNick.com, on Mastadon (@ByrdNick), and all the other platforms.  If you end up enjoying the Upon Reflection podcast, then feel free to tell people about it, online, in person, or in your review.

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I have a question for you: "If a bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total and the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?". Did 10 cents seem right? The authors of questions like this are attempting to lure you to accept this incorrect answer in order to test whether you thought reflectively when you solved the problem. However, there may be problems with this method of testing reflective thinking. So my colleagues used some underrated methods to determine the degree to which tests like this misclassify correct responses as reflective or lured responses as unreflective. I'll read the paper in this episode.

The (free) paper is "Tell Us What You Really Think: A think-aloud protocol analysis of the Verbal Cognitive Reflection Test". Special thanks to co-authors Brianna Joseph and Gabriela Gongora for helping me with Study 1 and to co-author Miroslav Sirota for helping with conceptualization and revisions. This paper is dedicated to the late Anders Ericsson (1947-2020), who helped inform the development of our online think-aloud protocol (Study 2).

Byrd, N., Joseph, B., Gongora, G., & Sirota, M. (2023). Tell Us What You Really Think: A Think Aloud Protocol Analysis of the Verbal Cognitive Reflection Test. Journal of Intelligence, 11(4), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence11040076

As always, free preprints of my papers are available on my CV at byrdnick.com/cv under "Publications".

This podcast is sponsored by Namecheap. Namecheap is committed to offering the best value and customer service for website domains, hosting, and SSL encryption certificates. After looking at their offers, I was tempted to switch my website to their services. You can learn more namecheap.pxf.io/byrd.

You can find the Upon Reflection podcast here or in your podcast app. You can also find out more about me and my research on Twitter via @byrd_nick, or on Facebook via @byrdnick. If you end up enjoying the Upon Reflection podcast, then feel free to tell people about it, online, in person, or in your ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review.

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In this episode, I read my short paper with Morgan Thompson in WIRES Cognitive Science titled, "Testing for Implicit Bias: Values, Psychometrics, and Science Communication". You may have heard about implicit bias. It is measured by indirect rather than direct measures of bias. We reconstruct arguments from debates about these measures, reveal some instances of talking past one another, highlight how debate has changed, and highlight how the debate is laden with value judgments about psychometrics and science communication. As always, free preprints of my papers are available on my CV under "Publications".

Byrd, N., & Thompson, M. (2022). Testing for Implicit Bias: Values, Psychometrics, and Science Communication. WIREs Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1612

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You can find the Upon Reflection podcast here or in your podcast app. You can also find out more about me and my research on Twitter via @byrd_nick, or on Facebook via @byrdnick. If you end up enjoying the Upon Reflection podcast, then feel free to tell people about it, online, in person, or in your ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review.

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This time I read my 2022 paper in Review of Philosophy and Psychology titled, "Great Minds Do Not Think Alike: Philosophers' Views Predicted by Reflection, Education, Personality, and Other Demographic Differences". As the title suggests, various psychological factors predicted variance in philosophers' answers to classic philosophical questions. This raises questions about how psychological and demographic differences can explain philosophical differences. There are also implications for scientific psychologists as well as academic philosophers.

Byrd, N. (2023). Great Minds do not Think Alike: Philosophers’ Views Predicted by Reflection, Education, Personality, and Other Demographic Differences. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 14(2), 647–684. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-022-00628-y

As with all of my writing, a free preprint can be found on my CV at byrdnick.com/cv under "Publications".

This episode was sponsored by Pimsluer. Pimsleur claims to help you become conversational in another language quickly and effectively so that you can understand and be understood when speaking to someone in another language. Find out more at imp.i271380.net/byrd.

You can find the Upon Reflection podcast here or in your podcast app. You can also find out more about me and my research on Twitter via @byrd_nick, or on Facebook via @byrdnick. If you end up enjoying the Upon Reflection podcast, then feel free to tell people about it, online, in person, or in your ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review.

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In this episode, I read one of my 2022 articles in Metaphilosophy titled, "Bounded Reflectivism & Epistemic Identity". Does reflective reasoning help or hinder our judgment? In this paper, I take a middle view between reflectivism and anti-reflectivism that I call bounded reflectivism. The idea is that reflection is a tool that can be used to improve our judgment or for other purposes (such as to defend the beliefs that we consider essential to our identity—a.k.a., our "epistemic identity").

Byrd, N. (2022). Bounded Reflectivism & Epistemic Identity. Metaphilosophy, 53(1), 53–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12534

As with all of my writing, a free preprint can be found on my CV at byrdnick.com/cv under "Publications".

This podcast was sponsored by Paying Green's Carbon Easy. Carbon Easy™ makes it easy for small and medium-sized businesses worldwide to reduce their carbon footprint in a measurable and publicly recognizable way. Find out how your company can meet its carbon goals at carboneasy.sjv.io/byrd.

You can find the Upon Reflection podcast here or in your podcast app. You can also find out more about me and my research on Twitter via @byrd_nick, or on Facebook via @byrdnick. If you end up enjoying the Upon Reflection podcast, then feel free to tell people about it, online, in person, or in your ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review.

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On this episode, I read one of my articles from 2021 titled, "Reflective Reasoning and Philosophy" in Philosophy Compass. Both philosophers and cognitive scientists seem to think that philosophical thinking could depend on whether we reason intuitively or reflectively. In this paper, I review the claims, scientific methods, evidence, and what we may need to do to improve our understanding of reflection's role in philosophical thinking.

Byrd, N. (2021). Reflective Reasoning & Philosophy. Philosophy Compass, 16(11). https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12786

As with all of my writing, a free preprint can be found on my CV at byrdnick.com/cv under "Publications".

This podcast was sponsored by Scholly. Scholly helps students and graduates find life-changing scholarships and loan payoffs. Find out how to access Scholly's funding at schollyinc.sjv.io/byrd.

You can find the Upon Reflection podcast here or in your podcast app. You can also find out more about me and my research on Twitter via @byrd_nick, or on Facebook via @byrdnick. If you end up enjoying the Upon Reflection podcast, then feel free to tell people about it, online, in person, or in your ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review.

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