Ben Chugg
Co-Host of Increments
I'm a PhD student in machine learning and statistics at CMU, where I work on various problems in mathematical statistics and probability theory. My background involves some math, some computer science, and a stint at a law school where I learned to pretend that I knew something about law.
Ben Chugg has hosted 83 Episodes.
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#84 - A Primer on Not Born Yesterday by Hugo Mercier
April 17th, 2025 | 1 hr 9 mins
gullibility, mercier, reason, social
A discussion on Hugo Mercier's Not Born Yesterday.
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#83 - The Anxious Generation Round II: Alternative Explanations
March 27th, 2025 | 1 hr 21 mins
anxious-generation, education, jonathan-haidt, mental-health, pessimism, social-media
Are there other hypotheses on the rise in self-harm rates among adolescents? Not any good ones, it turns out.
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#82 - Are Screens Really That Bad? Critiquing Jon Haidt's "The Anxious Generation"
March 6th, 2025 | 1 hr 52 mins
anxiety, haidt, mental health, parenting, social-media
A review of Jonathan Haidt's newest book on social media and adolescent mental health. Are we losing a generation to TikTok, or have social scientists forgotten how to make causal claims?
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#81 - What Does Critical Rationalism Get Wrong? (w/ Kasra)
February 13th, 2025 | 1 hr 39 mins
abstractions, deutsch, empiricism, philosophy, popper
We have Kasra on to discuss his essay "'The Deutschian Deadend," about the ways he thinks the philosophies of Karl Popper and David Deutsch are fundamentally wrong.
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#80 (C&R Series, Chap. 7) - Dare to Know: Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment
January 27th, 2025 | 1 hr 6 mins
categorical imperative, conjectures and refutations, cosmology, enlightenment, kant, morality, popper, romanticism, transcendental idealism
Back to the Conjectures and Refutations series. We discuss Immanuel Kant and his contributions to ethics, cosmology, politics, and the Enlightenment.
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#78 - What could Karl Popper have learned from Vladimir Nabokov? (w/ Brian Boyd)
December 9th, 2024 | 1 hr 39 secs
art, brian boyd, discovery, literature, nabokov, popper
Brian Boyd, the foremost expert on both Nabokov and Popper, comes on for a discussion about literature, discovery, and what Nabokov contributed to both.
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#77 (Bonus) - AI Doom Debate (w/ Liron Shapira)
November 19th, 2024 | 2 hrs 21 mins
ai, comedy, creativity, deep learning, existential risk, induction, knowledge, novelty, superintelligence
Part II of the great debate! Is AI about to kill everyone? Should you cash in on those vacation days now?
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#76 (Bonus) - Is P(doom) meaningful? Debating epistemology (w/ Liron Shapira)
November 8th, 2024 | 2 hrs 50 mins
ai, bayes, belief, epistemology, induction, popper, prediction
We were invited onto Liron Shapira's "Doom debates" to discuss Bayesian versus Popperian epistemology, AI doom, and superintelligence. Unsurprisingly, we got about one third of the way through the first subject ...
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#75 - The Problem of Induction, Relitigated (w/ Tamler Sommers)
October 23rd, 2024 | 1 hr 41 mins
belief, certainty, deduction, induction, justification, logic, popper
When Very Bad Wizards meets Very Culty Popperians. Famed philosopher, podcaster, and Kant-hater Tamler Sommers joins the boys for a spirited disagreement over Popper, and whether he solved the Problem of Induction.
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#74 - Disagreeing about Belief, Probability, and Truth (w/ David Deutsch)
October 1st, 2024 | 1 hr 32 mins
belief, certainty, epistemology, mathematics, probability, statistics, truth
We talk with David Deutsch about whether the concept of belief is a useful lens on human cognition, when probability and statistics are actually useful, and whether he disagrees with Karl Popper about the truth.
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#73 - The Unfairness of Proportional Representation
September 13th, 2024 | 1 hr 25 mins
democracy, first-past-the-post, government, policies, popper, proportional-representation
We discuss Karl Popper's theory of democracy, and why the first-past-the-post voting system is better than proportional representation.
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#72 (C&R, Chap. 19: Part II) - On the (alleged) Right of a Nation to Self-Determination
August 27th, 2024 | 51 mins 18 secs
conjectures and refutations, nation-state, nationalism, optimism, popper, progress
Second half of Chapter 19 of Conjectures and Refutations. Can we make it through more than one of Popper's five theses this time? (Hint: No, no we cannot)
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#71 (C&R, Chap 19: Part I) - The History of Our Time: An Optimist's View
August 2nd, 2024 | 1 hr 12 mins
conjectures and refutations, evil, good, history, incentives, popper, progress
A dive into Chapter 19 of Conjectures and Refutations, resulting in an hour long argument between Ben and Vaden about whether people are good, bad, or you know, just signaling.
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#70 - ... and Bayes Bites Back (w/ Richard Meadows)
July 9th, 2024 | 1 hr 30 mins
bayesianism, decision-making, probability, rationality, uncertainty
Rich comes on to defend Scott Alexander against our criticisms. Are we being unfair? Are the Bayesians simply the Most Rational People (MRP) and we can't handle it?
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#69 - Contra Scott Alexander on Probability
June 20th, 2024 | 1 hr 45 mins
bayesianism, credences, frequentism, probability, scott alexander, superforecasting
Cursed to return to this subject again, we attack the big man himself on probability. What's your credence that we're correct?
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#68 - Libertarianism IV: Political Issues (w/ Bruce Nielson)
May 30th, 2024 | 1 hr 50 mins
counterfactuals, libertarianism, metaphysics, politics
In our last libertarianism episode we tackle the remaining part of Scott's FAQ: Political issues! Can government ever do anything right? How should we think about that question? Is Scott being fair to libertarians?