Original Website Blurb from 2012
Tonight's episode is about our second-biggest secular religion (capitalism being #1). I've been thinking about these issues for a while, usually from the more scientific point of view, where I would usually agree with people like Michael Crichton or Freeman Dyson that evidence is the only reason to believe anything, and that emotions get in the way as often as not. There's a very large literature in psychology and neuroscience that shows this idea is crap, that emotions are more important than reason in everyday life, that a person without emotions is in fact crippled as a decision maker, but it's an appealing idea anyway. We like to believe in perfection, whether it's perfect Reason or perfect Sustainability.
As you'll hear in the episode, this weekend in particular I had personal experience with the primacy of emotion over reason.
I should say that while I normally and generally like the idea of impossibly perfect reason, I'm not a follower of either Crichton (State of Fear was not a good book) or Dyson. Never met them, don't know them personally. Here's the article that pointed me towards them on this issue:
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/environmentalism-as-religion
References from the Show
https://www.whqr.org/people/andy-wood
https://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/MercierSperberWhydohumansreason.pdf
Not mentioned specifically, but this is what I was reading at the time, and which I continue to think about sometimes today.
VSI Episode 36