Increments

Jan 27 2025 81 ep. 80 mins 122

Increments Podcast artwork

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 [email protected].

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#0 - Introduction

May 19 2020 8 mins

Ben and Vaden attempt to justify why the world needs another podcast, and fail. Support Increments

#80 (C&R Series, Chap. 7) - Dare to Know: Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment

Jan 27 2025 66 mins

Immanuel Kant was popular at his death. The whole town emptied out to see him. His last words were "it is good". But was his philosophy any good? In order to find out, we dive into Chapter 7 of Conjectures and Refutations: Kant’s Critique and Cosmology, where Popper rescues Kant's reputation from the clutches of the dastardly German Idealists. We discuss Deontol

#79 (Bonus) - The Mitford Sisters

Dec 28 2024 24 mins

Hope everyone is having a great holiday! Today we're releasing a short lil' bonus episode from the patreon archives before we get back into the serious and professional business of podcasting in the new year. A few months ago, Vaden appeared on the forthcoming Treacherous Jezebels podcast, to discuss the life of Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford, the most treacherous of jezebe

#78 - What could Karl Popper have learned from Vladimir Nabokov? (w/ Brian Boyd)

Dec 09 2024 60 mins

Where do you arrive if you follow Vaden's obsessions to their terminus? You arrive at Brian Boyd, the world expert on the two titanic thinkers of the 20th century: Karl Popper and Vladimir Nabokov. Boyd wrote his PhD thesis on Nabokov's 1969 novel Ada, impressing Nabokov's wife Vera so much that he was invited to catalogue Nabokov's unpublished archives. This led

#77 (Bonus) - AI Doom Debate (w/ Liron Shapira)

Nov 19 2024 141 mins

Back on Liron's Doom Debates podcast! Will we actually get around to the subject of superintelligent AI this time? Is it time to worry about the end of the world? Will Ben and Vaden emotionally recover from the devastating youtube comments from the last episode? Follow Liron on twitter (@liron) and check out the Doom Debates youtube channel and podcast. We discuss Definit

#76 (Bonus) - Is P(doom) meaningful? Debating epistemology (w/ Liron Shapira)

Nov 08 2024 170 mins

Liron Shapira, host of [Doom Debates], invited us on to discuss Popperian versus Bayesian epistemology and whether we're worried about AI doom. As one might expect knowing us, we only got about halfway through the first subject, so get yourselves ready (presumably with many drinks) for part II in a few weeks! The era of Ben and Vaden's rowdy youtube debates has begun. Vaden

#75 - The Problem of Induction, Relitigated (w/ Tamler Sommers)

Oct 23 2024 101 mins

When Very Bad Wizards meets Very Culty Popperians. We finally decided to have a real life professional philosopher on the pod to call us out on our nonsense, and are honored to have on Tamler Sommers, from the esteemed Very Bad Wizards podcast, to argue with us about the Problem of Induction. Did Popper solve it, or does his proposed solution, like all the other attempts, "fai

#74 - Disagreeing about Belief, Probability, and Truth (w/ David Deutsch)

Oct 01 2024 92 mins

What do you do when one of your intellectual idols comes on the podcast? Bombard them with disagreements of course. We were thrilled to have David Deutsch on the podcast to discuss whether the concept of belief is a useful lens on human cognition, when probability and statistics should be deployed, and whether he disagrees with Karl Popper on abstractions, the truth, and nothing bu

#73 - The Unfairness of Proportional Representation

Sep 13 2024 85 mins

Want to make everyone under 30 extremely angry? Tell them you don't like proportional representation. Tell them proportional representation sucks, just like recycling. In this episode, we continue to improve your popularity at parties by diving into Sir Karl's theory of democracy, and his arguments for why the first-past-the-post electoral system is superior to proportional

#72 (C&R, Chap. 19: Part II) - On the (alleged) Right of a Nation to Self-Determination

Aug 27 2024 51 mins

Part two on Chapter 19 of Conjectures and Refutations! Last time we got a little hung up arguing about human behavior and motivations. Putting that disagreement aside, like mature adults, we move on to the rest of the chapter and Popper's remaining theses. In particular, we focus on Popper's criticism of the idea of a nation's right to self-determination. Things were go