Paul Smaldino - Social identities, collective intelligence, and an ambling open life

Paul Smaldino is an explorer. That might seem like an odd way to describe a professor of cognitive science, but anyone who has glanced at his biography will recognize that he lives his life in exploration. His scholarship as his life are inspiration for keeping the lines of inquiry wide open and the things we can discover in doing so.

Origins Podcast Website

Flourishing Commons Newsletter

Show Notes:

• The Dancing Wu Li Masters (08:00)
• The Quantum and the Lotus (12:30)
• Sagehood (15:00)
• J. Krishnamurti and David Bohm (17:00)
• Simone de Beauvoir (18:00)
• Science as an ongoing process of flourishing (18:15)
• Jeffrey Shank (26:00)
• Richard McElreath (27:40)
• "Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation" Richardson et al. (28:00)
• "Social conformity despite individual preferences for distinctiveness" (35:00)
• "Maintaining transient diversity is a general principle for improving collective problem solving" Smaldino et al. (38:00)
• Philip Kitcher (46:00)
• explore-exploit tradeoff (46:10)
• replication crisis (49:00)
• The Knowledge Machine Strevens (50:30)
• "Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles" by C Thi Nguyen (53:00)
• "Interdisciplinarity can aid the spread of better methods between scientific communities" Smaldino and O'Connor (56:00)
• Wicked problems (56:30)
• C Thi Nguyen on Origins (57:00)
• Flourishing (58:00)
• Lightning round (01:05:00):
  • Book: Dune by Frank Herbert or Culture and the Evolutionary Process by Boyd and Richerson
  • Passion: film and music
  • Heart sing: two kids
• Find Paul online: Website

Logo artwork by Cristina Gonzalez

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