RS78 - Intelligence and Personality Testing

Release date: January 13, 2013

What's your IQ? Are you an ENTJ, or maybe an ISFP? What's your Openness score, your Conscientiousness score, your Neuroticism score? And just how seriously should you take all those test scores, anyway? In this episode of Rationally Speaking, Massimo and Julia discuss the science -- and lack thereof -- of intelligence and personality testing.

Julia's pick: "Effective Altruism"

Massimo's pick: "How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read"

RS77 - Victoria Pitts-Taylor on Feminism and Science

Release date: December 30 2012

In this episode, Massimo and Julia discuss sociology and feminism, with special guest Victoria Pitts-Taylor, professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Victoria explains how feminists in sociology are dealing with results in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, especially regarding the question: How much inborn difference is there really between women and men? Massimo and Julia challenge Victoria on some academic feminist views, and investigate how the fields of sociology and academic feminism reach their conclusions -- what methods do they use, and how would we know if they were wrong?

Victoria's picks: "Feminist Perspectives on Disability"  and "Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept"

RS76 - Crowdsourcing and the Wisdom of Crowds

Release date: December 16, 2012

What do Linux, Netflix, and the Oxford English Dictionary have in common? They've all benefited from the power of crowdsourcing, in which a task is outsourced to a group of hundreds or thousands of disparate people. In this episode of Rationally Speaking, Julia and Massimo discuss the phenomena of crowdsourcing, and ask: What makes it work? Is it ever unethical? And what are the limits to the wisdom of crowds?

Julia's pick: "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't"

Massimo's pick: The Phi2Phi App.

References:
"Longitude"