229: Erisology, the study of disagreement (John Nerst)

March 18, 2019

This episode features John Nerst, data scientist and blogger at everythingstudies.com, discussing a potential new field called “erisology,” the study of disagreement. John and Julia discuss why Twitter makes disagreement so hard; whether there’s anything to learn from postmodernism; John’s “signal and corrective” model that explains why disagreement persists even when people agree on the key facts; and how the concept of “decoupling” helps explains Sam Harris and Ezra Klein’s debate last year about IQ.

Transcript (PDF)