David Robson
Special guest
David Robson is a senior journalist at BBC Future, where he specializes in neuroscience and psychology. He was previously a features editor at New Scientist, and his writing has also appeared in the Atlantic and the Washington Post. His first book, The Intelligence Trap, examines the reasons why smart people make stupid mistakes, while offering some proven strategies to make wiser decisions - whatever your IQ or education.
David Robson has been a guest on 1 episode.
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Episode 16: Beware the Intelligence Trap! (with David Robson)
April 28th, 2019 | 59 mins 26 secs
binet, cognituve inoculation, culture, damasio, grossmann, iq test, lisa feldman-barrett, monte carlo fallacy baloney detection kit, psychology, robson, sagan, self-distancing, social psychology, somatic marker hypothesis, sternberg, terman, termites, wisdom
Do highly intelligent people actually take better decisions in their daily lives than everyone else? And if not, what’s missing from our picture of what it means to be ‘smart’? Can you be highly intelligent, yet flunk a rationality test? And rather than noise to be ignored, might our emotions help us make decisions that are actually more rational? David Robson joins Igor and Charles to discuss intelligence traps, Terman’s Termites, the Monte Carlo fallacy, Damasio’s Somatic Marker hypothesis, the competitive humility of the start-up culture, and the ‘brutal pessimism’ baked in to the dark history of the Intelligence test. Igor wrangles with the challenge of convincing leaders of the merits of intellectual humility in a culture obsessed with certainty, David advocates for widespread cognitive inoculations, and Charles learns that butterflies in the stomach after a date may mean love, but also may mean gastric flu. Welcome to Episode 16.