Increments

Vaden Masrani, a senior research scientist in machine learning, and Ben Chugg, a PhD student in statistics, get into trouble arguing about everything except machine learning and statistics. Coherence is somewhere on the horizon. Bribes, suggestions, love-mail and hate-mail all welcome at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

Episodes

#90 (Reaction) - Disbelieving AI 2027: Responding to "Why We're Not Ready For Superintelligence"

August 17, 2025 • 95 mins

Always the uncool kids at the table, Ben and Vaden push back against the AGI hype domininating every second episode of every second podcast. We react to "We're not ready for superintelligence" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KVDDfAkRgc) by 80,000 Hours - a bleak portrayal of the pre and post AGI world. Can Ben keep Vaden's sass in check? Can the 80,000 hours team find enough cubes for AGI? Is Agent-5 listening to you RIGHT NOW? L...

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#89 (C&R, Chap 6) - Berkeley vs Newton: The Battle Over Gravity

July 31, 2025 • 71 mins

Phlogiston? Elan Vital? Caloric? Mention of any of these at a party, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson will be sure to take you out back and kick you in your essences. So why do "essences" have no place in science? In this episode we explore that question (and dive into some of the history behind this debate) by reading Chapter 6 of Conjectures and Refutations: A Note On Berkeley As Precursor Of Mach And Einstein. In one corner, we have the...

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#88 (Bonus) - Homer's Odyssey

July 10, 2025 • 72 mins

This week we take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to listen to Ben, Rich, and Cam loutishly pontificate on one of the oldest poems in history. That's right, three fiction noobs take on Homer. Ladies, have you ever wondered what your fella is doing when you're out for the evening? Look no further. The podcast you're listening to is Do You Even Lit? (https://doyouevenlit.podbean.com/) which you can find on any podca...

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#87 - Gullibility, Belief, and Conformity (with Hugo Mercier)

June 20, 2025 • 54 mins

Ben and Vaden test their French skills and have Hugo Mercier on the podcast to discuss who we trust and what we believe. Are humans gullible? Do we fall for propaganda and advertising campaigns? Do we follow expert consensus or forge ahead as independent thinkers? Can Vaden go for one episode without bringing up Trump? Hugo Mercier (https://sites.google.com/site/hugomercier/) is a research director at the CNRS (Institut Jean Nicod...

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#86 (Reaction) - On Confidence and Evidence: Reacting to Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian (Part 2)

May 30, 2025 • 80 mins

Go fund me page for Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar Please donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-dr-alaa-alnajjar-and-her-family-in-gaza Podcast w/ Dr. Ali Al Najjar https://open.spotify.com/episode/2f6twY40sjd0zwT0Eks3NX Further Reading https://www.thesun.ie/news/15281868/sligo-doctor-ali-al-najjar-nieces-nephew-killed-gaza/ https://www.thejournal.ie/brother-woman-nine-kids-gaza-6717437-May2025/ https://amp.rte.ie/amp/1515399/ https://...

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#85 (Reaction) - On Confidence and Evidence: Reacting to Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian (Part 1)

May 8, 2025 • 109 mins

We all knew that Vaden would release his inner Youtube debate bro at some point. Well he finally paid Ben enough to do it, and here we are: our first reaction video. Today we're commenting on the video What's the most rational way to know? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNQlmVJxySc&t=3614s&ab_channel=CordialCuriosity), a discussion between Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian on the relationship between confidence and evidence. Are we...

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#84 - A Primer on Not Born Yesterday by Hugo Mercier

April 17, 2025 • 69 mins

Some thoughts (arguments?) on Hugo Mercier's Not Born Yesterday (https://www.amazon.com/Not-Born-Yesterday-Science-Believe/dp/0691178704), which advances the thesis that humans are not as gullible as is commonly thought. This is our second episode on Mercier's work, and we're as intrigued as ever. But this time we have different interpretations of his thesis, so it's a good thing the man himself is coming on soon to sort us out. W...

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#83 - The Anxious Generation Round II: Alternative Explanations

March 27, 2025 • 81 mins

Round two on the anxious generation. Well, honestly, round three. But we had a false start with round two, which is why this episode is a little late in coming. If you want to hear the gory, data-heavy details of our second attempt, you can access the episode by becoming a patron (https://www.patreon.com/c/Increments) (was there ever a better sell?). We discuss Whether the rise in self-harm rates was due to reporting changes Wheth...

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#82 - Are Screens Really That Bad? Critiquing Jon Haidt's "The Anxious Generation"

March 6, 2025 • 112 mins

Anxiety, dispair, loneliness, depression -- all we need is a social media recession! A popular thesis is that All The Bad Things things are on the rise among adolescents because of social media, a view popularized in Jon Haidt's 2024 book The Anxious Generation. Haidt is calling for an end of the "phone-based childhood" and hoping that schools banish all screens for the benefit of its students. But is it true than social media is ...

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#81 - What Does Critical Rationalism Get Wrong? (w/ Kasra)

February 13, 2025 • 99 mins

As whores for criticism, we wanted to have Kasra on to discuss his essay The Deutschian Deadend (https://www.bitsofwonder.co/p/the-deutschian-deadend). Kasra claims that Popper and Deutsch are fundamentally wrong in some important ways, and that many of their ideas will forever remain in the "footnotes of the history of philosophy". Does he change our mind or do we change his? Follow Kasra on twitter (https://x.com/kasratweets) an...

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#80 (C&R Series, Chap. 7) - Dare to Know: Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment

January 27, 2025 • 66 mins

Immanuel Kant was popular at his death. The whole town emptied out to see him. His last words were "it is good". But was his philosophy any good? In order to find out, we dive into Chapter 7 of Conjectures and Refutations: Kant’s Critique and Cosmology, where Popper rescues Kant's reputation from the clutches of the dastardly German Idealists. We discuss Deontology vs consquentialism vs virtue ethics Kant's Categorical Imperativ...

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#79 (Bonus) - The Mitford Sisters

December 28, 2024 • 24 mins

Hope everyone is having a great holiday! Today we're releasing a short lil' bonus episode from the patreon archives before we get back into the serious and professional business of podcasting in the new year. A few months ago, Vaden appeared on the forthcoming Treacherous Jezebels podcast, to discuss the life of Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford, the most treacherous of jezebels. Her biography is... shall we say... quite something. Ev...

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#78 - What could Karl Popper have learned from Vladimir Nabokov? (w/ Brian Boyd)

December 9, 2024 • 60 mins

Where do you arrive if you follow Vaden's obsessions to their terminus? You arrive at Brian Boyd, the world expert on the two titanic thinkers of the 20th century: Karl Popper and Vladimir Nabokov. Boyd wrote his PhD thesis on Nabokov's 1969 novel Ada, impressing Nabokov's wife Vera so much that he was invited to catalogue Nabokov's unpublished archives. This led to Boyd's two-volume biography of Nabokov, which Vera kept on her b...

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#77 (Bonus) - AI Doom Debate (w/ Liron Shapira)

November 19, 2024 • 141 mins

Back on Liron's Doom Debates podcast! Will we actually get around to the subject of superintelligent AI this time? Is it time to worry about the end of the world? Will Ben and Vaden emotionally recover from the devastating youtube comments from the last episode? Follow Liron on twitter (@liron) and check out the Doom Debates youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@DoomDebates) and podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/d...

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#76 (Bonus) - Is P(doom) meaningful? Debating epistemology (w/ Liron Shapira)

November 8, 2024 • 170 mins

Liron Shapira, host of [Doom Debates], invited us on to discuss Popperian versus Bayesian epistemology and whether we're worried about AI doom. As one might expect knowing us, we only got about halfway through the first subject, so get yourselves ready (presumably with many drinks) for part II in a few weeks! The era of Ben and Vaden's rowdy youtube debates has begun. Vaden is jubilant, Ben is uncomfortable, and the world has never...

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#75 - The Problem of Induction, Relitigated (w/ Tamler Sommers)

October 23, 2024 • 101 mins

When Very Bad Wizards meets Very Culty Popperians. We finally decided to have a real life professional philosopher on the pod to call us out on our nonsense, and are honored to have on Tamler Sommers, from the esteemed Very Bad Wizards podcast, to argue with us about the Problem of Induction. Did Popper solve it, or does his proposed solution, like all the other attempts, "fail decisively"? (Warning: One of the two hosts maaay h...

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#74 - Disagreeing about Belief, Probability, and Truth (w/ David Deutsch)

October 1, 2024 • 92 mins

What do you do when one of your intellectual idols comes on the podcast? Bombard them with disagreements of course. We were thrilled to have David Deutsch on the podcast to discuss whether the concept of belief is a useful lens on human cognition, when probability and statistics should be deployed, and whether he disagrees with Karl Popper on abstractions, the truth, and nothing but the truth. Follow David on Twitter (@DavidDeutsc...

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#73 - The Unfairness of Proportional Representation

September 13, 2024 • 85 mins

Want to make everyone under 30 extremely angry? Tell them you don't like proportional representation. Tell them proportional representation sucks, just like recycling (https://www.incrementspodcast.com/63). In this episode, we continue to improve your popularity at parties by diving into Sir Karl's theory of democracy, and his arguments for why the first-past-the-post electoral system is superior to proportional representation syst...

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#72 (C&R, Chap. 19: Part II) - On the (alleged) Right of a Nation to Self-Determination

August 27, 2024 • 51 mins

Part two on Chapter 19 of Conjectures and Refutations! Last time we got a little hung up arguing about human behavior and motivations. Putting that disagreement aside, like mature adults, we move on to the rest of the chapter and Popper's remaining theses. In particular, we focus on Popper's criticism of the idea of a nation's right to self-determination. Things were going smoothly ... until roughly five minutes in, when we start d...

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#71 (C&R, Chap 19: Part I) - The History of Our Time: An Optimist's View

August 2, 2024 • 72 mins

Back to the Conjectures and Refutations series, after a long hiatus! Given all that's happening in the world and the associated rampant pessimism, we thought it would be appropriate to tackle Chapter 19 - A History of Our Time: An Optimist's View. We get through a solid fifth of the chapter, at which point Ben and Vaden start arguing about whether people are fundamentally good, fundamentally bad, or fundamentally driven by signalli...

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Increments

Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}#90 (Reaction) - Disbelieving AI 2027: Responding to "Why We're Not Ready For Superintelligence"

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}#89 (C&R, Chap 6) - Berkeley vs Newton: The Battle Over Gravity

#88 (Bonus) - Homer's Odyssey

#87 - Gullibility, Belief, and Conformity (with Hugo Mercier)

#86 (Reaction) - On Confidence and Evidence: Reacting to Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian (Part 2)

#85 (Reaction) - On Confidence and Evidence: Reacting to Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian (Part 1)

#84 - A Primer on Not Born Yesterday by Hugo Mercier

#83 - The Anxious Generation Round II: Alternative Explanations

#82 - Are Screens Really That Bad? Critiquing Jon Haidt's "The Anxious Generation"

#81 - What Does Critical Rationalism Get Wrong? (w/ Kasra)

#80 (C&R Series, Chap. 7) - Dare to Know: Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment

#79 (Bonus) - The Mitford Sisters

#78 - What could Karl Popper have learned from Vladimir Nabokov? (w/ Brian Boyd)

#77 (Bonus) - AI Doom Debate (w/ Liron Shapira)

#76 (Bonus) - Is P(doom) meaningful? Debating epistemology (w/ Liron Shapira)

#75 - The Problem of Induction, Relitigated (w/ Tamler Sommers)

#74 - Disagreeing about Belief, Probability, and Truth (w/ David Deutsch)

#73 - The Unfairness of Proportional Representation

#72 (C&R, Chap. 19: Part II) - On the (alleged) Right of a Nation to Self-Determination

#71 (C&R, Chap 19: Part I) - The History of Our Time: An Optimist's View

Popular Podcasts

#90 (Reaction) - Disbelieving AI 2027: Responding to "Why We're Not Ready For Superintelligence"

#89 (C&R, Chap 6) - Berkeley vs Newton: The Battle Over Gravity