Very Bad Wizards
Very Bad Wizards is a podcast featuring a philosopher (Tamler Sommers) and a psychologist (David Pizarro), who share a love for ethics, pop culture, and cognitive science, and who have a marked inability to distinguish sacred from profane. Each podcast includes discussions of moral philosophy, recent work on moral psychology and neuroscience, and the overlap between the two.
Episodes
Tamler and David discuss The Odyssey books 17 & 18, in which Telemachus and Odysseus, back at home, continue their deception and put everyone to the test. Everyone except for Argos, that is, because Argos was (and will always be) a very good boy.
David and Tamler welcome Paul Bloom back to the show for a definitive ranking of classic psychology experiments. Will the shocking results of the Milgram studies earn him a posthumous 'S' ranking? How far will Zimbardo fall? Is the Stroop effect a super effect? Did you see the Gorilla in these notes? Which is more plausible: that we have Paul Bloom as a guest, or we have Paul Bloom and a guest and it's a banger? Note: no dogs or ba...
In this episode, Tamler and David discuss The Odyssey Books 15 & 16, in which father and son (and father figure and son) are reunited, and in which the Odysseus and Telemachus start planning their revenge against the suitors.
Tamler and David discuss Books 13 & 14 of The Odyssey. Odysseus finally makes it to Ithaca and meets up with Athena, gets a disguise, and has a chat with his most loyal slave Eumaeus.
Why do baseball players have so many superstitious rituals compared to athletes in other sports? How does this relate to the magic rituals of the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia? We dive into Bronisław Malinowski's classic 1925 paper "Magic, Science, and Religion" along with George Gmelch's "Baseball Magic," two articles that explore the role of religion and superstition as a response to the absence of control. And ...
David and Tamler discuss The Odyssey's iconic books 11 & 12, in which our hero visits the ghosts of the dead, hears the call of the sirens, and survives a no-win situation.
Tamler and David discuss the action-packed books 9 & 10 of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus makes some questionable choices, the crew encounters cannibal giants, and Circe casts her porcine spells.
Since well before the big bang, people have been bitching about Tamler's chosen field. We talk about Bernard Williams' (qualified) defense of analytic philosophy in his essay "On Hating and Despising Philosophy." We also dig into Lily Hu's review of a recent book by Christoph Schuringa, an ideological and historical critique of the philosophical tendency to think they engage in an unbiased perspective-free search for truth. Plus - ...
Tamler and David discuss books 7 & 8 of The Odyssey--while at Alcinous' palace in Phaeacia, Odysseus listens to poetry, plays some games, cries some more, and finally starts to regain his identity.
Tamler and David discuss books 5 & 6 of The Odyssey, where we follow Odysseus as he finally leaves Calypso's Island and returns to the realm of the human. We also finally pick a name for the podcast. But only after recording this episode (as will be obvious from the first few minutes).
Welcome to The Lotus Eaters! This is part 2 of our 12 part series on Homer's Odyssey that will be released every Thursday. The series was supported by our Patreon community, but we are now making it available to everyone who would like to listen to our discussions to accompany their reading of The Odyssey. We hope you enjoy!
Episode Notes:
Tamler and David finish up the Telemachy (the saga of Odysseus' son, Telemach...
Welcome to The Lotus Eaters! This is part 1 of our 12 part series on Homer's Odyssey that will be released every Thursday. The series was supported by our Patreon community, but we are now making it available to everyone who would like to listen to our discussions to accompany their reading of The Odyssey. We hope you enjoy! [Note that this discussion of Books 1 & 2 was already published as the main segment of Episode 321, but ...
Dropping this a week early - after completing a 12-part series on Homer's Odyssey for our beloved Patreon supporters, we now dive into Christopher Nolan's version of this epic tale. We're mixed on the movie. David enjoyed the spectacle, Tamler had some nice things to say about Anne Hathaway's Penelope but overall...well you'll see. And don't skip through the listener support/promo segment or you'll miss an exciting announcement.
First it was a book, then it was a groundbreaking movie… that's right it's Solaris. After having discussed the Stanislaw Lem novel in the previous episode, David and Tamler try to make contact with Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 classic film. We talk about all the ways Tarkovsky's adaptation reflects and diverges from the source material. We also discuss how to interpret the ending, opening act (not featured in the novel), the five...
David and Tamler tackle the first half of the VBW Madness topic tournament winner, Stanislaw Lem's science fiction masterpiece, Solaris, about a mysterious ocean planet that resists all attempts to understand and communicate with it. We talk about the epistemological obstacles that obscure the meaning of the ocean's behavior, the "guests" that appear to the researchers drawn from their buried memories, Lem's critique of science and...
The great Robert Wright returns to the podcast to talk about his new book The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning. We debate the magnitude of AI's potential impact, the natural selection analogy Bob presses in the book, and a whole lot more.
Plus, a new AI-powered collar can translate your pet's sounds and behavior into language with 95% accuracy! Still skeptical about the power of this new technology ...
What are the legitimate ways to inquire about the nature of the universe? We have science, metaphysics, phenomenological inquiry, but what about mystical and meditative practices? David and Tamler talk about a paper that argues for allowing mystical insight into our broader search for insight into fundamental reality. Plus, since the dawn of time man has wondered why people act like simps – we look at a study that operational...
David and Tamler do another tier ranking--this time on philosophical thought experiments, so as not to further alienate our chemistry-adjacent listeners. We hit most of the big ones: Pascal's wager, Pascal's mugging, Mary the color scientist, the Ring of Gyges, Jarvis Thomson's violinist, the experience machine, the utility monster, and a lot more. Can you guess our grade for the trolley dilemma?
- The Chinese Room (Searle) [wik...
In another Back 2 Basics episode, David and Tamler talk about Plato's "Crito," a dialogue that takes place two days before Socrates' death by hemlock. His friend Crito wants him to escape, but Socrates will only agree if they judge that it's the right thing to do. One imagined debate between him and the Laws of Athens later, Socrates decides to accept his punishment.
Plus we...
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