Increments
Science, Philosophy, Epistemology, Mayhem
About the show
Vaden Masrani, a senior research scientist in machine learning, and Ben Chugg, a PhD student in statistics, get into trouble arguing about everything except machine learning and statistics. Coherence is somewhere on the horizon.
Bribes, suggestions, love-mail and hate-mail all welcome at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.
Increments on social media
Episodes
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#93 (C&R Chap 10, Part I) - An Introduction to Popper's Theory of Content
October 16th, 2025 | 1 hr 47 mins
bayesianism, content, philosophy of science, popper, probability
An introduction to Popper's theory of content, following Chapter 10 of Conjectures and Refutations. Plus a lot of arguing about Bayesianism.
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#92 - Confronting the Paradox of Tolerance: Christianity in the age of Trump (w/ Jonathan Rauch)
September 25th, 2025 | 1 hr 7 mins
christianity, knowledge, laws, norms, paradox of tolerance, rauch, religion
Jonathan Rauch explains why he's radical incrementalist, how to uphold the constitution of knowledge, and his view on the fight for the heart of Christianity.
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#91 - The Uses and Abuses of Statistics (w/ Ben Recht)
September 4th, 2025 | 1 hr 16 mins
agi, artificial intelligence, rationality, statistics
What is statistics good for? Has it ever discovered anything? Where does the word "robot" come from? Ben Recht joins us to untangle these mysteries.
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#90 (Reaction) - Disbelieving AI 2027: Responding to "Why We're Not Ready For Superintelligence"
August 17th, 2025 | 1 hr 35 mins
agi, ai, doomerism, progress, superintelligence, technology, trends
The boys are hooked on reaction videos. This time: 80,000 hours' "Why we're not ready for superintelligence."
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#89 (C&R, Chap 6) - Berkeley vs Newton: The Battle Over Gravity
July 31st, 2025 | 1 hr 11 mins
atoms, berkeley, boltzman, conjectures and refutations, essentialism, forces, gravity, instrumentalism, mach, newton, popper
We dive into the history of the debate between Bishop Berkeley, Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Isaac Newton. What is a force? Are they allowed in science? Were the positivists right all along?
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#88 (Bonus) - Homer's Odyssey
July 10th, 2025 | 1 hr 12 mins
book-review, homer, literature, morality, odyssey
Three fiction inept science nerds take on the oldest poem in history.
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#87 - Gullibility, Belief, and Conformity (with Hugo Mercier)
June 20th, 2025 | 54 mins 13 secs
belief, communication, information, rationality, reason, trust
Hugo Mercier joins us to discuss his book "Not Born Yesterday" and his work on belief, gullibility, and how we change our minds.
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#86 (Reaction) - On Confidence and Evidence: Reacting to Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian (Part 2)
May 30th, 2025 | 1 hr 20 mins
A tragedy in Gaza affects one of Vaden's friends / Second half of our discussion about belief, confidence, and epistemology between Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian
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#85 (Reaction) - On Confidence and Evidence: Reacting to Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian (Part 1)
May 8th, 2025 | 1 hr 49 mins
belief, confidence, epistemology, falsification, reaction video
Reacting to a discussion about belief, confidence, and epistemology between Brett Hall and Peter Boghossian
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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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#79 (Bonus) - The Mitford Sisters
December 28th, 2024 | 24 mins 32 secs
hitler's sex life, the mitford sisters, treachery, unity mitford
Vaden was invited on to the forthcoming Treacherous Jezebels podcast to discuss Unity Mitford and her family. Ever wonder about Adolf Hitler's sex life? This episode has you covered.
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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.