Jules van Binsbergen

speaker

478 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 13 Aug

Jules van Binsbergen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

All Else Equal: Making Better Decisions · Rerun: Ep69 “The Science Behind Why We Don’t Just Say What We Mean” with Psychologist Steven Pinker - Part 1 · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

I'm just curious, how did you come to writing about this topic and to do

doing research into it because obviously the history in terms of game theory and other things in this topic is quite long, but I don't think we've ever seen anybody treat it the way you did in terms of s explaining human behavior.

Steven, you describe a number of situations, including some of biotalitarian regimes, where you want to prevent things from common knowledge because it's in the strategic best interest of the regime or an individual to prevent that.

But what about the other side?

Do you have insight into what psychologically drives some people with a desire to want to come clean because the thing is just bothering them too much, right?

Because coming clean to me,

That's another expression, I guess, that would mean something like, You know that I know that you know that I know that I've done something wrong and I want to get past that.

So what drives that motivation and what is the trade off between preventing things from coming knowledge and sometimes people voluntarily admitting guilt?

So one thing that fascinated me, and and I don't know whether you have insight into this or whether you did experiments with this, is that, you know, the first couple rounds of you know that I know that you know, maybe two or three rounds we all understand, then there's a bit of a void, and then there's the common knowledge that we all understand.

Now, do you have any sense in which people could train themselves in the number of mentalizing rounds that they can do?

Or do you think that

This is not something that you can teach yourself to become better at.

Is this just a mental thing that we can only keep track of for a certain number of rounds and after that it just won't work?

Have you have you experimented with people training themselves in it?

I see.

So in that way you can recombine and get to more complicated structures by embedding pre labeled experiences.

But it that would still require a lot of practice to be familiar with that particular routine.

So the last one that I thought was absolutely fascinating was the example of the Russian protester who's standing there with the blank sign and the secret police comes and says, you know, what is this about?

And then the person says, I don't need to write what it's about because everybody already knows what it's about.

The only thing you needed was the focal point to make things unravel.

Showing 201–220 of 478 · page 11 of 24