I was recently contacted by a fan of the show asking for advice in the choice of their research topic. Oddly, the best advice I could give them pertained to philosophy of science. In this episode, I expand on what I told them, to explain the most important ideas in the philosophy of science that I think are worth knowing about. My ultimate target is Imre Lakatos. If you can understand Lakatos' idea of research programs then you have all you need. However, in order to properly understand Lakatos,...
Jun 28, 2021•1 hr 25 min
When we ask the question of whether something is "nature or nurture", we are implicitly suggesting a dichotomy, or excluded middle - it is either nature, or nurture, or a mix of both, but not a mix of both plus something else . In The Hidden Half , Michael Blastland takes us on a journey of skepticism which somehow magically reveals the presence not only of a "third factor", but shows, startlingly, that such a factor has been known to account for as much as half (!) of the variation in some trai...
Jun 14, 2021•52 min
So far, one of my most downloaded episodes has been number 42, on Sir Ken Robinson's talk Do Schools Kill Creativity? Numerous members of the audience have told me that they appreciated my critical eye on the matter. But at that time I had not read any of Ken Robinson's several bestsellers. "Don't you think you should? How can you be critical of him when you haven't even read him?" It was goading from someone else, asking me to rise to my own intellectual standards, that made me finally give in....
May 31, 2021•35 min
Let's set things straight - intelligence isn't really *all* that matters. The editor seems to have forced a provocative title that even the author doesn't agree with. But intelligence does really matter, and the evidence on this point is overwhelming. Early on in my study of education, I was enamoured with Carol Dweck's Mindset research, and in all of my growth mindset zeal I couldn't bear to even consider that people might differ in some apparently "fixed" way. However, with time I have had the...
May 17, 2021•1 hr 20 min
This is the second part of the episode about Robert Haskell's book Transfer of Learning . In this part, we go in detail into the importance of rich declarative knowledge for transfer. Topics include: The difference between surface structure and deep structure of problems, and how experts can see through the former to get at the latter, allowing transfer to happen How pure scientific discoveries with no application resulted in groundbreaking technological breakthroughs decades later Prolific inve...
May 04, 2021•43 min
One central question which I find very difficult to answer is "What is education for?". There seem to be many parallel purposes, most of which are subjective, ill-defined, and hard to measure. It is difficult to navigate between the Scylla of unrealistic expectations far from the core activities of school (e.g. developing well-adjusted entrepreneurial job-ready good citizens) and the Charybdis of uninspiring flat-footed apparent irrelevancies (e.g. hoping that they at least remember Pythagoras' ...
May 03, 2021•1 hr 4 min
"Critical thinking" is an idea commonly discussed in education. Most people who talk about it say we need more of it. Almost nobody seems willing or able to define it. I have trouble believing in it. With anything that I believe, I keep an open mind and even force myself against my cognitive biases to hear out those whose opinions I disagree with. This has been very useful to me in the past, as there have been a number of education-related ideas that I have had to eschew on further investigation...
Apr 19, 2021•1 hr 24 min
Phillip Tetlock is an expert on expertise, but of a different kind to the late K. Anders Ericsson. While Ericsson's work focused on experts within "kind" domains (as defined by Range author David Epstein) such as music and chess, where feedback is near-immediate and clear and the rules are known to all and stated at the outset, Tetlock is interested in those who specialise in "wicked" domains, such as economics and politics. These are fields in which we can't run experiments or train for specifi...
Apr 05, 2021•55 min
Jaron Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer of virtual reality technology. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now , as you might expect, he outlines his dissatisfaction with the status quo of the Internet. He admits that his generation of Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs made a grave error in the early days of the Internet by paradoxically believing in the power of everything being "free", while at the same time hero-worshipping successful billion...
Mar 29, 2021•1 hr 7 min
This is the last part of the multi-part episode on David Lancy's The Anthropology of Childhood . I share the main points of what I've learned, what I think of the book, and the way that Professor Lancy summarises the main points of the text. Among the things we've learned are the differential ways that WEIRD (western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic) societies and most societies throughout history approach topics such as: Reproduction; Family structure; Parenthood; The social stat...
Mar 01, 2021•52 min
This is the second from last part of the multi-part episode on The Anthropology of Childhood by David Lancy. This part concerns school. It answers questions such as: What are parents' attitudes to school when exposed to it for the first time? How do children from traditional pre-state societies fare when schools are introduced to their communities? What has the experience of schooling been like in most times and places in the world? How do parents from different societies prepare (or not) childr...
Feb 25, 2021•56 min
This recording is the seventh part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood . In this episode, we look at adolescence, including questions such as: Does adolescence really exist? How does it vary across societies? What role do adolescents play in social change? Why are teenaged boys so obnoxious? Enjoy the episode.
Feb 25, 2021•29 min
This recording is the sixth part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood . In this episode, we look at children learning through work, including questions such as: When do children start doing chores? What is their attitude to them? How does learning through chores tend to differ by gender? How do young people learn crafts? What are apprenticeships like? Why do they exist separately from the main body of craft learning? How similar are any of these l...
Feb 25, 2021•37 min
This recording is the fifth part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood . In this episode, we look at the nature and role of play in children's lives, including questions such as: In societies without many material possessions, what do children play with? Are there any toys? What kind of games do children play? How does this vary from culture to culture? What commonalities are there in play behaviour between humans and other animals, and across huma...
Feb 25, 2021•50 min
This recording is the fourth part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood . In this episode, we look at the transition in children's lives into the "age of sense" and the way in which they learn their culture, including questions such as: What ways of learning do we see consistently across cultures? What differences in attitude to learning do we see between industrialised cultures and pre-state societies? How does this vary over the lifespan? What ro...
Feb 25, 2021•50 min
This recording is the third part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood . In this episode, we look at community involvement in childrearing, including questions such as: Why do some anthropologists consider attachment theory, the most well-established component of developmental psychology, to be "cultural ideology"? Why, in most societies, are older sisters so keen to raise their younger siblings? What is "toddler rejection" and why is it so common ...
Feb 25, 2021•39 min
This recording is the second part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood . In this episode, we look at reproduction and the family, including questions such as: What attitudes and practices are there to family size and family planning in pre-state societies? What are the roles of mothers and fathers in these societies? How do cultural practices such as patri- vs. matrilocal residence or monogamy vs. polygamy vs. polyandry affect family structure and...
Feb 25, 2021•1 hr 33 min
The Anthropology of Childhood is a monumental work of scholarship. Professor David Lancy has combed the ethnographic record with an eye to understanding the range of experiences of children around the world in different types of societies - hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers and herders, pastoral nomads, and modern industrialised societies, particularly in the West and in East Asia. The author also considers juveniles of other primates, such as chimpanzees and bonobos. I consider it to be so ...
Feb 25, 2021•1 hr 19 min
Rote memorisation is commonly reviled. I think some careful consideration of its role is in order. In short, my position is that rote memorisation is an inefficient approach, but sometimes difficult to avoid (such as when learning foreign language vocabulary), and should not be shied away from when there is no other option, though we should certainly do what we can to use alternatives. In the recording I also talk about ways to reduce or eliminate rote memorisation where possible, cultural diffe...
Feb 22, 2021•59 min
This book is about slot machines. It is creepy. By way of this book, we can arrive at a new psychological idea which Natasha Dow Schüll calls "the machine zone", but I prefer to call "dark flow". The word flow is already used in psychology to refer to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of optimal experience, in which time distorts, the sense of self disappears, and the subconscious and conscious mind work in harmony. Dark flow is similar to flow, but... for want of a better term, it's evil. Where...
Feb 08, 2021•1 hr 7 min
This recording serves as an appendix to the episode on James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. In his book, he provides 36 principles of learning that he proposes in his book on the basis of the psychological effectiveness of computer games. In my opinion, 36 principles is far too many; ideally, I would have five or fewer. I thought that a principle was supposed to be a distillation, and so a proliferation of them seems counterproductive and rather ir...
Feb 01, 2021•24 min
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy is a book that I read early in my education research quest. At the time, I thought that it had interesting points to make, but I was unclear on quite how to react to it. After several more years of reading and research, it's clear to me that this book is deeply flawed. First of all, the author redefines "literacy" in a very strange way. He takes any form of semiotic system to count as a "type" of literacy. So, for example, if you know...
Jan 25, 2021•1 hr 30 min
I endeavour to understand and explain the field of education through many disciplines, including neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, economics, and evolutionary biology. Over the course of this podcast's history, I have changed in my reading habits and focus across these disciplines, and in my attitude as to how useful they can be, and where they are best applied. Psychology stands out as a case in point. At first, I thought that psychology would hold all the secrets to kn...
Jan 11, 2021•46 min
This episode starts with some unfinished business from episode 100. Then I review the topics and themes that have arisen over the history of the podcast.
Jan 02, 2021•1 hr 23 min
I started the podcast on the 1st of January 2016 with an episode introducing myself. In this episode, I reintroduce myself, my reasons for starting the podcast, and what I hope to achieve. I also talk about the broad strokes of the development of the podcast and of my own thinking over the last 5 years.
Jan 01, 2021•54 min
Chinese culture has the concept of the "four great inventions" (四大發明) - inventions from ancient China that are points of pride in Chinese history, and symbolic of Chinese technical and scientific sophistication. The inventions in question are the compass, gunpowder, the printing press, and paper. One could say that there is one "invention" that is conspicuously absent. During the Sui dynasty (581-618 AD), the emperor was concerned that the aristocracy held too much power, in particular by occupy...
Dec 21, 2020•1 hr 42 min
Range is a book that I saw in a bookshop and called out to me like little else can. Subtitled "Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World", I felt as though it were written for me personally. It seems as though the way to "get ahead" is to specialise early and specialise hard, drilling deeply into a single topic until you become a world expert. Get your 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in before the competition gets there first. And yet I find myself always moving from topic to topic, wea...
Dec 14, 2020•1 hr 35 min
When we speak about people who have achieved a lot in their lives, we usually apply a single noun to describe them. Winston Churchill - politician; Nicolaus Copernicus - astronomer; Isaac Newton - mathematician; Christopher Wren - architect; Omar Khayyam - poet. In The Polymath, Waqas Ahmed reminds us that this is a misrepresentation of their lives. Did you know that Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize - for literature? That Copernicus also had discoveries in economics and mathematics, while s...
Dec 07, 2020•1 hr 40 min
People often talk about how to work better, but it is rare to hear discussion of how to rest better. Take the famous so-called "10,000 hour rule". This is adapted (with some distortion) from the work of K. Anders Ericsson, the late great psychologist of expertise. The nature and volume of practice among top performers in various fields, as described in his work, is widely cited. But the same research contains details of how high performers rest differently. And yet nobody seems to have taken not...
Nov 30, 2020•59 min
Having looked into research on first language vocabulary development over two recent episodes, now it's time to get into literacy more generally. What happens in people's minds when they read? And how do they learn to read? This book breaks down the cognitive elements of the process of reading. Starting from written signs, it describes how these are turned into sounds (via two different mechanisms), and then how those sounds relate to word meanings; these meanings then combine with context and o...
Nov 23, 2020•1 hr 19 min
