56. Andy Norman - Mental Immunity: Inoculating against conspiracies and disinformation

My guest today is Dr Andy Norman, who is the award-winning author of ‘Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think’.

His research illuminates the evolutionary origins of human reasoning, the norms that make dialogue fruitful, and the workings of the mind’s immune system. He champions the emerging science of mental immunity as the antidote to disinformation, propaganda, hate, and division.

Currently, Andy directs the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University and is the founder of CIRCE, the Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative. 

Some of the topics we covered include:

• Andy’s entry into philosophy
• The mind’s ‘immune system’
• Definition of ‘mind parasites’
• Manipulation gone to scale
• Simple conspiracy vs complex reality
• The challenge of debating against conspiratorial thinking
• The incentives that fuel misinformation
• How to prevent mind infections
• Determining whether a belief is ‘reasonable’
• Evolutionary origins of our capacity to ‘reason’
• Dangers of confirmation bias
• Factors that make us vulnerable to ‘mind parasites’
• The dangers of hitching belief to identity
• Developing a ‘mind vaccine’
• The ‘New Socratic Method’

During the show, Andy and I discussed a paper he wrote in response to Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s book ‘The Enigma of Reason’. You can download that paper here.

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