PODCAST

Upon Reflection

Nick Byrd

A podcast about what we think as well as how and why we think it.

science social sciences

All Episodes

29:00

Upon Reflection, Ep. 16: Strategic Reflectivism

Upon Reflection ·

2025/10/08

In late 2025, artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI popularized the idea of automating the process of selecting which model is best for a task. This allowed users to simply send their prompt or request and let the system determine whether to respond using a "fast" or a "slow" reasoning model.In a 2022 paper, I suggested that this kind of strategic deployment of slow, more reflective reasoning could be crucial to good judgment and decision-making. Since then, I have been synthesizing the

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43:28

Ep. 15 - A Two-Factor Explication Of ‘Reflection’

Upon Reflection ·

2025/05/19

You may have heard me drone on and on about this thing called "reflective thinking". We philosophers and cognitive scientists are preoccupied with it. However, we lack a definition of 'reflective thinking' that can serve both philosophers and scientists.Because I do both philosophy and cognitive science, I've had to synthesize a measurable construct from fields like psychology and philosophy. In this episode, I'll read my latest paper, which explains the two key features of 'reflection' and

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49:02

Ep. 14 - Analytic Atheism & Analytic Apostasy Across...

Upon Reflection ·

2025/04/02

You may have heard that atheists tend to score better on reflection tests than theists? But why do scientists find this "analytic atheism" correlation?Many studies have attempted to answer this question. Of course, even the best studies had limitations. So Steve Stich, Justin Sytsma, and I developed better methods and studied over 70,000 people on 6 continents. What did we find? Apostasy was key. Those who shed their religion since childhood were the most reflective. Lifelong atheists were

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30:51

Ep. 13 - Reflection-Philosophy Order Effects and...

Upon Reflection ·

2025/03/05

Suppose you glance at a clock that, unbeknownst to you, is broken, showing the same time all day. Nonetheless, you happened to look at the clock precisely when it showed the correct time. So your belief about the time is correct. My question is this: did you know what time it is?Perhaps you think that you did. After all, you formed a belief on the basis of a device that most people trust and the belief was true! What else would it mean to know something? Well, in academic philosophy, the

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32:57

Ep. 12 - Tell Us What You Really Think (with B....

Upon Reflection ·

2023/04/25

I have a question for you: "If a bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total and the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?". Did 10 cents seem right? The authors of questions like this are attempting to lure you to accept this incorrect answer in order to test whether you thought reflectively when you solved the problem. However, there may be problems with this method of testing reflective thinking. So my colleagues used some underrated methods to determine the degree to which

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23:05

Ep. 11 - Testing Implicit Bias (with Morgan Thompson)

Upon Reflection ·

2022/06/01

In this episode, I read my short paper with Morgan Thompson in WIRES Cognitive Science titled, "Testing for Implicit Bias: Values, Psychometrics, and Science Communication". You may have heard about implicit bias. It is measured by indirect rather than direct measures of bias. We reconstruct arguments from debates about these measures, reveal some instances of talking past one another, highlight how debate has changed, and highlight how the debate is laden with value judgments about psychometrics

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47:14

Ep. 10 - Great Minds Do Not Think Alike

Upon Reflection ·

2022/05/04

This time I read my 2022 paper in Review of Philosophy and Psychology titled, "Great Minds Do Not Think Alike: Philosophers' Views Predicted by Reflection, Education, Personality, and Other Demographic Differences". As the title suggests, various psychological factors predicted variance in philosophers' answers to classic philosophical questions. This raises questions about how psychological and demographic differences can explain philosophical differences. There are also implications for scientific

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40:55

Ep. 9 - Bounded Reflectivism & Epistemic Identity

Upon Reflection ·

2022/04/06

In this episode, I read one of my 2022 articles in Metaphilosophy titled, "Bounded Reflectivism & Epistemic Identity". Does reflective reasoning help or hinder our judgment? In this paper, I take a middle view between reflectivism and anti-reflectivism that I call bounded reflectivism. The idea is that reflection is a tool that can be used to improve our judgment or for other purposes (such as to defend the beliefs that we consider essential to our identity—a.k.a., our "epistemic

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24:03

Ep. 8 - Reflective Reasoning & Philosophy

Upon Reflection ·

2022/03/23

On this episode, I read one of my articles from 2021 titled, "Reflective Reasoning and Philosophy" in Philosophy Compass. Both philosophers and cognitive scientists seem to think that philosophical thinking could depend on whether we reason intuitively or reflectively. In this paper, I review the claims, scientific methods, evidence, and what we may need to do to improve our understanding of reflection's role in philosophical thinking.As with all of my writing, a free preprint can be

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16:43

Ep. 7 - Do Unreflective Intentions Undermine Free Will?

Upon Reflection ·

2021/08/10

On this episode of Upon Reflection, I read my 2021 paper in Logoi titled, "On Second Thought, Libet-style Unreflective Intentions May Be Compatible With Free Will". Imagine if I could predict your behavior before you even became conscious of your intention to behave that way. Would this mean that you don't have free will? I used to think so. In this paper, I explain why I was wrong: my view of free will involved magical thinking. Some figures from the paper. As with all of my writing, a

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46:52

Ep. 6 - Your Health vs. My Liberty (Pandemic...

Upon Reflection ·

2021/07/18

Welcome to the latest episode of Upon Reflection. This time, I read my paper with Michał Białek, "Your health vs. my liberty: Philosophical beliefs dominated reflection and identifiable victim effects when predicting public health recommendation compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic" (Total N = 998). As the title suggests we found that complying with public health recommendations didn't depend on whether people received messaging about identifiable COVID-19 victims or statistical victims in

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15:53

Ep. 5 - Reflective Reasoning For Real People...

Upon Reflection ·

2020/08/10

Welcome to Upon Reflection. In this episode, I review the major take-aways and findings from my dissertation titled, "Reflective Reasoning For Real People". I explain what cognitive scientists mean by terms like "reflective reasoning", how reflection is measured empirically, how reflection can either help or hinder our reasoning, how more reflective philosophers tend toward certain philosophical beliefs, and how reflection may help us retrain our implicit biases. The recording is from my

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34:48

Ep. 4 - Online Conferences: Some History, Methods,...

Upon Reflection ·

2020/05/04

In this episode of Upon Reflection, I explain how academics should conference better. More accurately, I read my chapter, "Online Conferences: Some History, Methods, and Benefits" from Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene. This chapter reviews some history of online academic conferencing going back to the 1970s, explain the potential advantages of online conferences, report quantitative and qualitative results from three online conferences, and urge scholars

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40:21

Ep. 3 - Causal Network Accounts of Ill-being

Upon Reflection ·

2020/01/12

In this podcast, I read my chapter, "Causal Network Accounts of Ill-being: Depression & Digital Well-being". The paper reviews how well-being and ill-being can be understood in terms of the causal networks studied by economists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and other scientists.

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1:19:35

Ep. 2 - Not All Who Ponder Count Costs (with Paul...

Upon Reflection ·

2019/09/02

In this podcast episode , I'll be reading Paul Conway's and my recent paper about moral dilemmas entitled, "Not all who ponder count costs: Arithmetic reflection predicts utilitarian tendencies, but logical reflection predicts both deontological and utilitarian tendencies". In this paper we find that—contrary to some dual process theories' claims—consequentialist responses to moral dilemmas may not be more reflective per se, but rather more influenced by mathematical information. As with all of

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53:23

Ep. 1 - What We Can Infer About Implicit Bias

Upon Reflection ·

2019/08/19

Welcome to the first episode of Upon Reflection, a podcast about what we think as well as how and why we think it. In this podcast, I'll be reading my paper entitled, "What We Can (And Can't) Infer About Implicit Bias From Debiasing Experiments". I argue that implicit bias is not entirely unconscious or involuntary, but it probably is associative. As with all of my papers, the free preprint of the paper can be found on my CV at byrdnick.com/cv under "Publications". If this sounds like the

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1:22

Episode 0 - Welcome to Upon Reflection with Nick Byrd

Upon Reflection ·

2019/07/29

Welcome to the first, introductory episode of Upon Reflection, a podcast about the philosophy of cognitive science and the cognitive science of philosophy. In this podcast I'll be sharing my own and others' research with you. For instance, I'll talk about the differences between intuition and reflection and how intuitive reasoning predicts different philosophical beliefs than reflective reasoning. I'll also discuss topics like implicit bias and how—contrary to what you may have

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Upon Reflection

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