Delving In with Stuart Kelter Stuart Kelter

Tom Chivers is a science writer who has won several awards, including the Royal Statistical Society’s award for statistical excellence in journalism, the Association of British Science Writers’ science journalist of the year, and the Times’s science books of the year. He has written three books. His first, The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity’s Future, was published in 2019. His second book, How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them) was published in 2021. His just-released third book, entitled Everything is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World, is the subject of today’s interview.
Recorded 5/21/24.

Colin Wayne Leach is a social and personality psychologist at Columbia University, who researches Schadenfreude -- i.e., deriving pleasure from witnessing someone else's misfortune -- and related emotions, such as Genugtuung, which means deriving pleasure from seeing justice done.
Recorded 4/12/21.

Ran Barkai is the co-author, with Eyal Halfon, of the recently published book, They Were Here Before Us: Stories from the First Million Years. Dr. Barkai is a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, who for 20 years has co-directed the excavations and research at Qesem Cave in northern Israel. His wide-ranging research interests encompass stone tool technology, human-elephant interactions, and altered states of consciousness.
Recorded 5/14/24.

Vardit Ravitsky is a Professor of Bioethics at the University of Montreal and President of the International Association of Bioethics. Her research focuses on the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics/genomics and assisted reproductive technologies and their implications for women’s autonomy and for disability rights. She is President of the International Association of Bioethics; Director of Ethics and Health at the Center for Research on Ethics; member of the National Human Genome Research Institute’s (NHGRI) Genomics & Society Working Group; a 2020 Trudeau Foundation Fellow and Chair of the Foundation’s COVID-19 Impact Committee, as well as Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and of the Hastings Center.
Recorded 4/14/21.

Jay Joseph is a clinical psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Joseph challenges the empirical evidence behind the mainstream view that mental illness is genetically based, and argues instead that the real causes include oppression, trauma, abuse, and psychologically unhealthy aspects of the social and political environment. He is the author of four books, most recently The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2015), and Schizophrenia and Genetics: The End of an Illusion (2017). He is a contributor to the Mad in America website, and the creator of https://thegeneillusion.blogspot.com/.
Recorded 4/16/21.

David Olds is a professor at the Pediatrics-Prevention Research Center at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He has devoted his long and distinguished career to the developing and testing of very early interventions in family and child functioning, starting prenatally and continuing through toddler age. After devoting decades to high quality, random assignment, longitudinal, comparison studies – showing the approach yielded dramatic benefits – Dr. Olds went on to win grant after grant, to implement what came to be called the Nurse-Family-Partnership program, now in 40 states and 8 foreign countries, today serving close to 40,000 families in the U.S. and 18,000 families abroad. The program has shown positive, substantial, long-term effects in the prevention of child abuse and neglect, school failure, injuries, depression, anxiety and anti-social behavior in children. Research from Nurse-Family-Partnership program (https://www.nursefamilypartnership.org/) have served as the primary evidentiary foundation for a $2.3B federal investment in evidence-based home visiting.
Recorded 5/3/21.